Kent & Medway ICS launches Medical Collaborative Bank with Locum’s Nest
All the NHS organisations in Kent and Medway have been working together as a Sustainability and Transformation Partnership (STP) since 2016. In 2021, NHS England formally accredited the Kent and Medway as an Integrated Care System (ICS). Spanning across 80 miles, the ICS is made of 6 NHS Trusts* (4 Acute, 1 Mental Health and 1 Community Trusts) whose aim is to tackle a range of challenges to improve health and care for a population size of nearly 2 million.
Why the system needs to change
The number of people living in Kent and Medway is predicted to rise by almost a quarter by 2031 while over half of its practice nurses could retire in 10 years. If staffing was in line with the national average, there would be 175 more GPs in Kent and Medway. In response to these challenges, the ICS has manifested its ambition to work as one system to recover from the pandemic, address health inequalities and support staff wellbeing by empowering them with more flexible working options.
6 NHS Trusts working as one Health System
The Kent and Medway ICS is forming its cloud-based medics collaborative to enable clinicians to cross-cover shifts across 6 NHS Trusts - exponentially expanding the size of individual Trust’s staff pool, and ultimately deliver more patient care hours. The drive to grow a medics collaborative, regardless of speciality, is built on the ICS’s long-term vision to improve patient care while improving the working lives of its clinicians. By benefiting from an enhanced work-life balance, every healthcare professional can focus on what they do best, looking after their patients. Offering bank working options at neighbouring Trusts, has shown to support clinicians’ job satisfaction as more rewarding.
A unified workforce response to support the most challenging geographic hospital locations
The ICS’s collaborative approach will enable the 6 Trusts to build long-term and significant resilience into operational workforce processes. It will provide the ICS with greater influence on how resources are used to best effect for patients. The cloud-based collaborative bank solution, enabled by Locum’s Nest, will provide an extra layer of cascade for bank shifts, whereby if an individual Trust is unable to fill a shift with their own bank staff they can cascade this to the shared collaborative bank (via the cloud) and book doctors from other Trusts’ bank pool. In the Kent and Medway ICS geographic context, the Digital Passport technology will allow all hard-to-reach hospitals to instantly access a larger bank to fill more gaps in their rotas, and help ensure safe staffing levels. In the case of the East Kent NHS Trust, comprising five hospital sites including Kent & Canterbury Hospital, the ICS medics collaborative will connect the Trust with a network of doctors six times bigger than its own staff bank.
For NHS Trusts and ICSs wishing to find out more about the project or seeking to deploy similar models of collaborative working, please contact Dr Ahmed Shahrabani at ahmed@locumsnest.co.uk.
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*List of Trusts:
Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust
East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust
Kent and Medway NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust
Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust