The NHS Collaborative Bank – MWL, the UK’s largest collaborative staff bank

The Challenge

Mersey and West Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust (MWL) (formerly St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust), the Lead Employer in the North West of England, had a vision for the region’s temporary workforce – the ability to book shifts through systems that enable workers to pick up shifts quickly, safely and easily, whilst ensuring the most efficient and effective system was in place to satisfy financial and governance requirements.

By facilitating increased collaboration between trusts and unifying segmented staffing pools, the main objective was to provide clinicians with a choice in how they work shifts and to ensure they are paid akin to the ambitions set out in the NHS People Plan. This objective needed to be met whilst also providing managerial control and relieving the pressure of admin-intensive tasks with an intelligent digital staff bank service.

Following the proven success of the trust’s internal staff bank which was already live across all staff groups, Patchwork was selected to provide a fully integrated collaborative staff bank solution, which could provide complete visibility over all workers and ensure robust financial and governance oversight.

The Solution

End-to-end workforce management solution, Patchwork Health, delivered a bespoke collaborative staff bank solution in the North West, where everyone’s objectives – from the individual through to the organisational – are achieved simultaneously.

The digital staff bank, enables almost 6000 clinicians to work shifts across 25 trusts, promoting flexible working opportunities and acting as a secondary staffing pool for employers. Within the first four years, the shared safety net of workers had already filled over 490,000 hours of shifts, maintaining patient safety at a time of increased pressure on staffing resources.

From the initial project meetings, MWL and Patchwork involved a selection of clinicians to represent the region’s resident doctors and to ensure that flexible working and user requirements were met. Since the service launched, over 90% of resident doctors have been onboarded within 48 hours of signing up. Approved clinicians benefit from access to a range of shifts across the region, giving them exposure to experiences and opportunities in their working life that were not possible prior to the establishment of the collaborative.

Shifts transfer seamlessly between each trust’s e-roster system, the trust’s local bank and the regional collaborative staff bank. This highly resilient layer of integration not only drastically reduces administration by automating tasks, but also minimises errors and is backed by a single source for all data reporting to ensure robust governance and financial efficiency.

The project has retained £32.7 million in the NHS in 4 years, and in the same timeframe has saved £3 million in agency spend.