As a lead employer, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust took the initiative of launching the roll-out of a collaborative bank across the South East London integrated care system (ICS) to support the delivery of the Covid-19 vaccination programme.
The collaborative bank, which was facilitated by Allocate’s CloudStaff software, was pre-planned and implemented at speed to enable the sharing of trained vaccinators across the ICS trusts. It also ensured staff were paid correctly and on time, and provided assurance that staff had the necessary skills required for the rosters.
Working closely with Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Foundation Trust, Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust and King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, the collaboration has saved time on removing the need for recruited vaccinators to have to be recruited again in order to work at another Trust.
However, the real success story comes from the collaboration between the ICS trusts which has enabled relationships to be built across different teams
Vanessa Parker, Head of Temp Staffing at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, comments: “As an ICS we already work closely together to make temporary staffing improvements, including agreeing best practice, creating myth-busting information, and tracking financial savings made – £7 million over the last three years. The CloudStaff project has brought the trusts even closer together in collaborative thinking and working. The support from our Allocate project lead has been exceptional. They understood our challenges and what we needed to accomplish, and haven’t stopped supporting us throughout the whole implementation, which in itself was extremely swift and easy.”