Enhancing patient care through better utilisation of resources is a key objective in healthcare provision. However, managing a wide range of skills and competencies, requirements and demands is an onerous task. To have the right skills available in the right place at the right time, to budget and to an agreed care standard, while ensuring fairness in dealing with staff requests can take hours without the aid of technology.

SMI has worked with healthcare organisations since 1989 and has developed Staff.Care to ease the burden involved in this process. Staff.Care automates the manual processes involved in the compilation of the rota while allowing skilled staff to use their judgement and knowledge to fine tune the suggested plan. It greatly reduces the time taken to produce the rota as it takes all of the elements of demand and availability into consideration and automatically produces an optimised solution for review by management.

Staff.Care maintains details of contract, bank and agency staff combined with available staff at the appropriate grade. When deciding whether a staff member should work a particular shift, their past and future working patterns, as well as current requests are considered. Based on all the available information Staff.Care creates the rota automatically; more accurately, quickly and fairly.

The budget for the shift, day, rota period and year are maintained in Staff.Care and are taken into account when the rota is produced. It also keeps track of staff member’s hours owed and owing which are then carried over into the next rota period as appropriate.