Enhancing HR case management at Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
As a forward-thinking and dynamic department, the Employee Relations (ER) team at Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals wanted to modernise its existing case management solution and utilise a more flexible approach to managing and tracking ER cases.
Project highlights
- Managing on average 200 cases per month
- 25-30 per cent reduction in time updating cases from previous solution
- Reducing number of overall cases and accelerating resolution
Overview
First established in 1998 following a merger of two hospitals, Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is the largest provider of acute hospital services to Surrey residents.
The Trust serves a population of more than 410,000 people and employs around 4,400 individual members of staff. In order to enhance processes, improve productivity and boost engagement for all employees throughout the Trust, the HR team is focussed on utilising new technology to make operational efficiencies.
Situation
As a forward-thinking and dynamic department, the Employee Relations (ER) team at Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals wanted to modernise its existing case management solution and utilise a more flexible approach to managing and tracking ER cases. The overarching vision for Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals is to implement the latest modern technology to generate real-time insights on employee cases for ER Managers and provide the Trust’s Deputy Chief People Officer with a daily overview on case activity.
The Trust’s previous solution did not meet the set requirements and became time consuming for staff due to the manual data entry required for each stage of the process. The lack of customisation, functionality to generate analytical reports and having the transparency of cases over a long period of time prompted the need to move to a new provider that could work with them to customise the system in line with their needs.
Jatinder Bham, ER Manager at Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: “From an operations point of view, our previous system wasn’t doing what we needed it to do. The process of managing cases became too admin heavy and the team didn't have the reporting capabilities it needed, which meant we had to manually extract data in an attempt to try and develop our own insights.”
Customer profile
Having a real-time view of current HR cases and how this looks for the overall Trust has been vital. The ability to visualise the data within the dashboard provides a comprehensive overview of our current caseload and I can also delve deeper into specific cases and datasets if needed.
Solution
In order to meet the high demands of managing an average monthly caseload of around 200, Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals sought the expertise from Conformity Software and went live with CaseworkER in June 2023. The digital solution is used by 10-12 employees across the Trust’s HR team, from HR and ER advisors to ER manager, assistants, and business partners. CaseworkER is used by the team to process a range of case policies, such as bullying and harassment, sickness, grievance and dignity at work.
Part of the implementation led by Conformity Software, involved the seamless migration of historic cases from the previous solution to CaseworkER, allowing past data to be captured in reports and any ongoing cases to be actioned without interruption.
To keep the Deputy Chief People Officer up to date on HR activity right across the board, the case management solution was customised to issue daily prompts via email to highlight real-time insights including a direct link to the system’s dashboard interface – providing caseload data via visual charts that are displayed in an easy-to-read, digestible format.
Pami Bains, Deputy Chief People Officer at Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: “Having a real-time view of current HR cases and how this looks for the overall Trust has been vital. The ability to visualise the data within the dashboard provides a comprehensive overview of our current caseload and I can also delve deeper into specific cases and datasets if needed. The daily prompts that I receive have been very helpful in keeping me up to date on live cases and a summary on the number of cases that have been resolved over a period of time. This is exactly what I was looking to achieve from the solution, so much so, we have aspirations to roll this implementation out to the leadership across the rest of our clinical division.”
Benefits
Since using CaseworkER, Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has been able to reduce the number of overall cases and speed up the time it takes to review each case, as well as being able to analyse cases in a much more measured way to reach the final resolution stage.
Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals has seen a 25-30 per cent reduction in time spent updating cases compared with the previous solution. Simplifying and removing the volume of actions needed to enter information and adding more meaningful stages to each case policy has led to accelerating efficiencies for the wider trust and reducing the number of cases becoming backlogged or delayed.
The built-in dashboard gives HR practitioners a transparent view of live cases and allows reports to be generated on a specific data set or range, clearly highlighting trends in behaviour and outcomes. Historic and live cases are split into two to show migrated files and case policy, allowing them to be easily differentiated and extracted for reports.
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