Dr Charles Armitage, co-founder and CEO at Florence, a platform connecting care providers in need of staff for vacant shifts with nurses and carers to help cover them, speaks on the role that health technology plays in supporting the workforce.
I graduated as a doctor in 2012 and worked across a number of positions – A&E, care of the elderly and surgery, in London and on the South Coast.
I then started off my surgical training to be a plastic surgeon, and I loved it. But there were other parts of the job that I found too frustrating, with the overarching challenge being the way that the NHS manages and treats its workforce.
Together with Dan Blake, we decided that we wanted to reform the system. And at the base of our idea was how we could use technology to connect the workforce in a more efficient way.
Struggling NHS
Dr Charles Armitage, co-founder and CEO at Florence
For too long, the UK’s under-funded, over-stretched system has pushed more NHS and social care professionals to leave than to stay; with ever-growing vacancies and Covid-19 adding to the pressure.
The issues can be categorised into short, medium and long-term trends.
Unfortunately, the long-term trend for the NHS looks highly problematic. As a result of the improvement in medical development, there is thankfully a big shift in the number of people living longer lives.
However, there are less people around to take care of them. That means that sectors like social care are in trouble with the demand for their services getting even higher – especially with the NHS struggling to meet those demands already.
In terms of medium to short term trends, we’ve seen an acute spike, certainly over the winter period and because of Covid – where the NHS has been really struggling.
Admittedly, the ship has settled somewhat, but there is still a grave concern. This has also been fuelled by wage concerns within the NHS, staff burnout post-covid and the reduction in free movement post Brexit.
These are problems that aren’t going away – we need to do something about it. While there are ways to improve the short-term factors that have made things so difficult over the past couple of months, we cannot ignore the long-term trends which won’t magically disappear.
Workforce ecosystem
At Florence, we’ve been able to build an end-to-end workforce ecosystem that looks to deal with these issues.
Florence allows the care provider to hire, train, onboard and roster staff within the platform and then use it to fill all the shift vacancies.
By having everything available under one umbrella, one system, it doesn’t just make it easier to get the right people into the shift at the right time, but care providers and hospitals will be much more efficient and, ultimately, deliver higher-quality care.
In terms of workers, of course, we want to help workers find shifts that they want to work, but we also want them in their permanent jobs to be able to interact with their employers in a much more flexible way.
We want workers to have more choice over when they work, be able to swap shifts and pick things up if they are looking for additional income.
We also want to be able to train and develop them so if someone comes into the sector as a carer with no experience, we can take them on the development ladder, get them into the social care sector and continue to up-skill our workers.
Backbone of support
As is the case with many other start-ups, we made a lot of mistakes along the way when developing our product but after much hard work, we’ve landed with a really strong platform.
We’ve built Florence to be the backbone of support, with the goal of fixing the broken NHS and social care staffing model for good.
It is a source of great pride that over 90,000 care professionals and 2,000 organisations have joined Florence since 2017.
And we remain as committed as ever to our original objective to help make health care and social care outstanding, through innovation and the use of technology.
