How Digital Technology Improves Staff Satisfaction in the NHS

By May 22, 2017NHS, Technology

The staff are what keeps the NHS on its feet. They are the ones who ensure everything runs as it should, despite cuts to funding for services, despite having more complex health needs to treat, despite waiting on that long overdue pay rise. The NHS staff are the heroes of our healthcare system, they stay late after their long shifts, kindly talk patients through any concerns and are somehow able to stay calm while their establishment crumbles around them in an uncertain political and economic climate. As a result of this, staff satisfaction in the NHS is critically low.

In midwifery especially, for example, there is a huge concern over staff retention in the field, as is the case across several NHS disciplines. In the RCM’s 2016 Report ‘Why Midwives Leave’ it states that there is a current shortage of 3,500 midwives with an increase of around 100,000 births since 2002. A band six midwife has even seen pay decrease of £4000!

The same report and comprehensive survey states that the overarching reason for midwives leaving was due to staffing, workload and not enough time to spend with women to deliver the high quality care they needed.

What if there were ways that Trust’s could support their staff to deliver this higher quality care? By minimising unproductive tasks like unnecessary admin and travel, staff can spend time on what’s important and increase the time they spend doing what they trained to do – to help deliver care.

With our mobile digital solution MIA, we are increasingly finding that staff satisfaction is one of our top benefits.

At one Trust last year, after a forward-thinking Lead Midwife and her community team saw the value of implementing efficient technology, and their Bradford score improved by 74%. Implementing MIA Maternity was not the only thing the team did, of course, they also improved Wi-Fi availability in their community hubs and introduced mobile workstations. But with a mobile solution like MIA, that works online or offline to complete clinical notes they are saving on average of 5 hours a week, per midwife; and the tasks they are cutting back on are the ones that make them unhappy at work!

This comes from not having to travel back to base at the end of the day to re-key paper notes into the Trust’s EPR, because MIA synchronises them transparently. It comes from not misplacing files or valuable forms because they’re digitised and accessible on a tablet device from anywhere, improving team information sharing. It means that midwives can now get home on time at the end of their shift, where before they had to fight over too few workstations back at base to type their notes up.

Very few, if any, NHS clinical staff do what they do because they want to spend time on admin, paperwork and getting stuck in traffic. These unnecessary tasks are stressful and stressed-out staff do not deliver the best care possible because they are worried about other things. By introducing smart technology like MIA a Trust is investing in its staff, giving them the best tools in order for them to deliver the best care.

It’s not just maternity that MIA can help with, any clinical paper process in the NHS can benefit from an agile development approach into a streamlined digitised solution. Check out our website to read about our other solutions, download brochures and find our more about improving staff satisfaction in the NHS. Any questions? Why not tweet us @isosec.

Harry Robinson

Author Harry Robinson

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