“I loved the clinical aspects of being a doctor. But one thing that really struck me was the fact that the intense schedule left me with little time for study, research, innovation or leisure,” Anas Nader tells Health Tech World.
“I always thought I’d be a portfolio career doctor, who spent quite a lot of time using his stethoscope, but also enough time pursuing other projects. But the NHS job was sadly quite inflexible and frustrating on account of the workforce systems that we all had to operate within.”
Anas is co-founder and CEO of Patchwork Health. Their suite of technology and services help make staffing systems more flexible and more sustainable; for example, allowing organisations to pool staff and more easily fill rota gaps.
Anas and co-founder Dr Jing Ouyang came up with the idea of a shift-booking app while working as doctors. Anas was given the opportunity to develop the idea while on an innovation fellowship at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.
“Within a few months of launching Patchwork in 2017, we saw the needle move dramatically.
“Before launching our solution, around 20 to 30 per cent of shifts were being booked internally by the staff bank at Chelsea and Westminster, while the rest of the shifts went to agency. We brought bank shift fill up to 85 per cent.
“Since then, we’ve worked hard to improve our solution in line with the needs of our NHS partners. But our early successes proved that we could move the needle just by getting some of the workflows right.”
Patchwork’s Hub enables organisations to manage end-to-end temporary staffing, such as recruitment, onboarding, shift management and pay rate controls. Meanwhile, the Worker App empowers clinicians to book shifts, submit timesheets and track payments.
Patchwork now operates at more than 70 NHS hospitals, with around 35,000 clinicians using the app. The Patchwork team continues to follow two guiding principles, Anas says.
“The first is the importance of the user experience in the offline world. Whether you are a rota manager, HR manager, doctor or a nurse, what happens in your world outside of the edges of the screen often means the success or failure of a product.
“The second guiding principle was that we couldn’t just be a pure software house. We had to provide an implementation service, the sort of team that is knowledgeable about the domain and brings so much expertise to the table.”
Over the past 18 months, Patchwork has evolved from a temporary staffing platform to a complete end-to-end workforce solution, including a new rostering product, for both full and part-time workers.
The company has created an accelerator programme, inviting 10 NHS trusts to help them evolve the platform, taking into account all the things that really matter to clinicians and employers.
Through this dialogue, they have captured a breadth of narratives that are helping to shape the platform for all users.
“We’ve always known that to truly transform flexible working across healthcare, we need to address the larger workforce crisis which is sadly driving more clinicians out of their jobs.
“We wanted to harness the principles of clinician empowerment and flexible working to make the NHS the employer of choice for all clinicians.
“Roughly 85 per cent of doctors and nurses in any given hospital are permanent workers, the rest are temporary staff. We want to serve all of them.”
Patchwork’s solutions save hospitals around 100 hours of admin each month on average, Anas says. Clinicians can largely manage their own bookings safely and compliantly, requiring minimal negotiation with management. And common sticking points like pay can easily be automated, reducing errors and frustration.
This all contributes to net savings of £40 million across the NHS.
“Most hospitals have seen anywhere from three to five times growth on their staff bank.
“That network creates a lot more resilience in the system, which really came across during COVID-19.
“Not just the network of doctors, but the processes in the system where you can instantly reshuffle your workforce into different clinical expectations and environments.”
Patchwork conducted a number of pro bono COVID-19 projects, including ‘hot and cold’ clinics for symptomatic and asymptomatic patients at South Liverpool NHS Treatment Centre.
GPs were offered the opportunity to self-book onto vacant shifts which increased staffing levels and reduced the admin burden.
Thanks to Patchwork, 80 per cent of shifts were filled within seven days of being advertised. Staff numbers increased by 60 per cent within two months.
“We’ve also created a patient COVID-19 risk assessment tool for each shift within our platform. So is your department, for example, paediatrics, low score, or ITU, very high score?
“We can also assess whether a doctor or nurse is high risk depending on certain health parameters. This has meant that hospitals can guide decision-making around which doctors and nurses can be booked onto a shift to help reduce exposure.”
For all Patchwork’s achievements, Anas is especially proud of the Collaborative Banks.
The North West Collaborative Bank enables 5,500+ clinicians to safely passport their credentials between Trusts. Anas believes that collaborative banks will play a huge role in the future of flexible working in the NHS.
“We’ve also got a couple of exciting new partnerships with flagship hospitals that are looking at full deployment of Patchwork’s solution across all staff groups, and across all use cases.
“That excites us because a lot can be done with the regulation-compliant data our system generates – especially when it comes to enabling better workforce planning and workforce deployment.
“The more complete the system is, the wider its usage within the hospital, the more use cases we cover, the more valuable that information is for the hospital itself to better plan.
“That kind of data visibility will help the hospital make some very meaningful decisions in the future.”
