The Urgent Fix to Relieve Strain on Emergency Care Services

Urgent and emergency care services are a critical part of healthcare provision in the UK. In the face of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and broader transformations within the NHS, it is essential that urgent and emergency care services are ready to meet the increase in demand which services are now experiencing on an ongoing basis. In a recent report entitled ‘The Future of UEC Services’, the government has looked more closely at how urgent and emergency care needs to evolve, encompassing lessons learned from the pandemic during the past year. 

The government has underlined its commitment to:

• Investing heavily in clinical capacity
• Augment NHS 111 call handling capacity 
• Develop technologies to improve efficiency in healthcare services

To improve efficiency in urgent and emergency care services in any meaningful way, it’s not just essential to fill vacant posts, but also to relieve some of the pressures on clinicians within these services. This includes reducing the amount of cumbersome paperwork they have to complete, freeing them up to spend more time on care provision and reducing work-related stress by making processes easier, more efficient and improving compliance. 

In order to achieve this, emergency care services must:

• Simplify processes
• Reduce unnecessary administrative tasks
• Ensure staffing levels meet demand
• Automate systems wherever possible to improve efficiency and comply with relevant CQC guidance and regulations. 

Many urgent and emergency care services are currently struggling to manage administrative tasks and maintain CQC compliance, owing to high levels of staff turnover and the excess paperwork that is generated when hiring and on-boarding new staff. NHS recruitment is a time-consuming process involving interviewing, credential-checking and on-boarding of new recruits, which can take several months to complete. However, urgent and emergency care services need to be able to respond to changes in demand quickly; recruit clinical staff easily; on-board efficiently and above all, meet regulatory requirements in full. In order to do this, automation and streamlining of processes is key.

In addition, services must be ready to respond to wider changes, such as the planned re-introduction of CQC inspections in the coming months. Although the CQC paused routine inspections in March 2020 in direct response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the regulator has now issued an update detailing plans to return to more proactive inspection activity. Whilst this will form part of a wider strategy to regulate services in ‘a more dynamic and flexible way’, providers need to be ready to answer any risk or safety concerns raised by the CQC as the regulator returns to a more active role in overseeing health and social care services. ‍

Let the software do the work

Automating processes with software designed for healthcare not only helps urgent and emergency care services hire, on-board and credential-check new staff without delay, it can also help avoid ‘burnout’ in existing staff members, enhancing staff wellbeing by simplifying systems and reducing workload. Furthermore, choosing the right system leads to better staff retention rates by improving the hiring  experience for applicants.

In order to withstand the ongoing pressures faced by urgent and emergency care services in the UK, providers must look to make efficiency improvements to support clinical staff, improve retention and stay on the right side of regulatory compliance. To achieve this, the automation of key processes - such as hiring, on-boarding and compliance - is essential. Providers of urgent and emergency care services should identify platforms which can help them to:

• Hire staff faster
• Improve staff retention by streamlining processes
• Master regulatory compliance
• Simplify inductions, training and credential checking of new staff
• Avoid wasting clinical man-hours on admin tasks.

If you’re looking for a simple, intuitive and flexible software platform that can help you achieve all of these improvements, then get in touch with us and find out how we can help.

Because there has never been a better time to transform healthcare recruitment.