Increasing the productivity of nurses and other healthcare workers must be a priority for leading organisations, NHS bodies have required.
This is a cost-cutting measure, and just a 1% improvement to workforce productive would mean £400 million in savings, according to the report from NHS England, Public Health England, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and other commanding organisations.
This will be part of a Sustainability and Transformation Plan that all local authorities and clinical commissioning groups must create, requiring them to be in finanacial balance by the end of 2017. If they don’t meet their deficit goals, funding will not be given and sanctions will be applied.
In their plans, they must answer questions on how they will get the most out of their existing workforce and how they will “develop, retrain and retain a workforce with the right skills, values and behaviours in sufficient numbers and in the right locations.” There will also be e-rostering for nurses to increase the quantity of work they achieve.
“All providers will be expected to evidence the effective use of e-rostering for nurses, midwives, health care assistants (HCAs) and other clinicians to make sure the right staff are in the right place at the right time to ensure patients get the right hours of care and minimum time is wasted on bureaucracy,” the report reads.
Other goals that must be achieved by the end of 2017 include:
• A “significant increase” to the number of people using electronic health records.
• Make an appointment booking app available for patients from April 2016, with access to their full medical record and agreed data sharing opt-out.
• Put robust data security standards in place for confidential patient data.
• Ensure half of people experiencing their first episode of psychosis to access treatment within two weeks.
• Increase the number of people with learning disabilities/autism being cared for by community not inpatient services
• Agree and implement a plan to improve crisis care for all ages, including investing in places of safety, and implement the agreed actions from the Mental Health Taskforce.
• Continue to meet a dementia diagnosis rate of at least two-thirds of the estimated number of people with dementia.
Deliver the 62-day cancer waiting standard, and make progress in improving one-year survival rates.
See the full report here
