Lantum’s workforce management platform: Mobilising Primary Care staff during the vaccination programme – and beyond

The Health Innovation Network works with a number of innovators who could potentially support the health and social care sector. As we move further into the delivery of the Covid-19 vaccination programme, Primary Care systems have accelerated digital transformation in workforce management. We have invited Melissa Morris, CEO of Lantum, a workforce management platform that helps NHS providers to e-roster, rapidly deploy and engage their workforce, who describes how organisations have been adopting Lantum’s Connected Scheduling platform to staff sites – and why their success proves the need for workforce management platforms to be used as standard throughout Primary Care.

As I’m writing this, Primary Care Networks (PCNs) and Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) across England are running around 100 vaccination sites with Lantum. Since December, we’ve been working with clients to help them organise and mobilise their workforce so they can do their part in delivering the largest vaccination project in the NHS’s history.

What Lantum does?

I founded Lantum seven years ago because, as an NHS strategy consultant, I saw how ineffective staffing processes were harming the healthcare system. A lack of technology to understand clinical capacity, as well as a lack of staff engagement and flexibility, was reducing fill rates, feeding an overreliance on locums, driving up costs, and ultimately impacting the provision of care.

Lantum tackles those problems by transforming how healthcare systems engage with and deploy their staff. Unlike other platforms, our Connected Scheduling platform offers an end-to-end solution – bringing the entire workforce together at system or network level, and then making it easy to deploy them across organisational boundaries to wherever they’re needed. It does this through three tools:

• A system or network-wide staff bank – Made up salaried and non-salaried staff, of all staff types, verified for compliance.
• A clinician network – Made up of 30,000+ vetted locum clinicians who can be booked at lower rates than agencies charge.
• An integrated rota tool – Allowing scheduling of staff directly from the bank or network, with automatic staff notifications and time-saving features like automated payments.

Using Lantum to staff vaccination sites

At the start of the vaccination programme, many organisations were staffing sites by emailing and phoning staff and creating rotas in Excel. A microcosm of the staffing challenge that plays out every day in Primary and Secondary care, the process was time consuming, ineffective, and it was taking time away from clinicians who should have been focussed on care.

Now working with Lantum, they are creating banks of multidisciplinary staff – from GPs to nurses and administrators – and scheduling workers into shifts using the integrated rota tool. The tool automatically notifies staff of bookings and suggests replacement workers if cancellations are made, and also takes care of invoicing and payments. As the live rotas can be accessed by multiple rota managers simultaneously, visibility is also improved and clashes are reduced.

Since November, we’ve onboarded over 9,000 staff and filled over 30,000 shifts across vaccination sites. The results have been amazing. We know from other clients that Lantum can reduce administration time by up to 50 per cent, and that is reflected in vaccination sites too. One rota manager told us that the influx of applications to fill a shift meant she “couldn’t stop grinning”, while another filled all admin shifts for a week within just seven minutes.

But as well as reducing workloads, Lantum also increases fill rates. On average, our clients are achieving a fill rate of 91 per cent – ultimately getting more people vaccinated more quickly.

Connected Scheduling is the future for Primary Care

We believe that the transformation our clients have made over the last few months is proof of how all Primary Care workforces could be – and should be – organised and mobilised.

We have already seen the cost savings and efficiencies that Lantum’s Connected Scheduling delivers. But the future of Primary Care means that workforce management platforms will soon be more than beneficial – they will be necessary.

The expansion of Integrated Care Systems (ICSs), the growth in portfolio careers, and the advent of the Additional Roles Reinbursement Scheme (ARRS), makes it clear that Primary Care is moving towards a system of flexible multi-disciplinary workforces that deliver integrated services. To make this model a success, Systems will need the technology to support it – and staff banks alone will not be enough. Instead, Systems must find technology partners like Lantum who can enable full visibility of the workforce, and deliver end-to-end staffing transformation to make the possibility of truly integrated Primary Care systems a reality.