This Mental Health Awareness Week, You Okay, Doc? Ambassador Dr Emily Palmer writes about why medicine is a lonely profession and gives her top tips on how to best manage loneliness.

Read how The Digital Collaborative Bank, powered by Locum’s Nest, enabled 10 NHS Trusts to fill more vacant shifts, which contributed to positive outcomes in a challenging year. This highlights how the use of workforce technology with collaboration allows Trusts to share a more expansive and forever growing pool of workers.

Locum’s Nest Co-Founder and NHS Innovation Accelerator Fellow, Dr Ahmed Shahrabani, discusses his organisation’s bespoke response to help tackle the care backlog at North Middlesex University Hospital NHS Trust.

Switching off from work can, paradoxically, be incredibly stressful. This is especially true for those working high-demand jobs in fast-paced environments where work never sleeps. It’s often difficult to turn off our work brain, making it easy for those pesky, intrusive thoughts to sneak home with us and form a chorus inside our heads.

Mental health organisations are facing a unique combination of concerns which have only been worsened by the pandemic. In this article, we share the challenges facing the NHS mental health workforce - and how innovative workforce management technologies such as Locum’s Nest, can help to overcome them.

Burnout levels are higher than ever and yet the pressures of the winter months and the new COVID-19 wave continue. Sara Campin, Founder & CEO of The Nourish App, shares 9 simple mindset tips and practical strategies to help you safeguard your sanity and find more work-life balance, even in the midst of the current pressures.

We know that technology does not work without the people to back it up and engage with it. So how can we ensure these time-saving and potentially life-saving solutions are successfully adopted? In this article we explore the importance of change management within the NHS, and how we, as a leading healthcare tech provider, support organisations through this challenging process.

The winter pressure on the NHS is felt by all, in whatever field you work in. For Dr Claire Agathou, Ambassador for mental health charity You Okay, Doc?, going to work and leaving when it is cold and dark means taking some extra measures to ensure her own health doesn’t suffer as a result. Read her top tips for surviving the winter pressures.

In this article we share a snapshot of actions NHS HR & OD teams can start to implement to future-proof workforce planning and create long lasting cultural change in their organisations. These 6 key actions have been directly extracted from 3 out of the 8 main themes laid out in ‘The Future of NHS HR & OD 2030 vision’.

I have to admit that it hasn’t been easy compiling the ‘killer’ list precisely because there isn’t one. Some of these tips will work for some, and for some others they will be completely useless... but here we go, I hope some will prove useful to you or your loved ones.

London’s largest mental health Trust, Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust, will be enabling flexibility for both medics and Allied Health Professionals with the adoption of our leading shift matching and rostering technology.

Protecting healthcare professionals’ mental health has always been our top priority. Long before Covid-19, we outlined our mission to enable better flexibility, staffing and collaboration within the NHS.

We are therefore delighted to announce we have recently joined forces with ‘You Okay, Doc?’, a mental health charity that seeks to improve and support doctors’ wellbeing worldwide.

In the third episode of our video series ‘Designing for HealthTech’. Our Co-Founder, Dr Nicholas Andreou, and Head of Design, Jason Peart, met to share how, through a series of microinteractions, the Locum’s Nest app has not only heightened engagement between frontline users and management, but has improved the overall wellbeing of our NHS people.

At Locum’s Nest, we understand that healthcare processes can be rather time-consuming and stressful to complete. That’s why we’ve partnered with Doctors Appraisal Consultancy (DAC) to bring our users peace of mind and prepare you as you get ready to progress your medical career. DAC are our doctors’ appraisal provider of choice, with a friendly team of experts on hand to help you through the appraisal and revalidation process.

We are delighted to share that the North Central London Sustainability and Transformation Partnership (NCL STP) has appointed Locum’s Nest to create London’s largest collaborative staff bank for their 10 NHS Trusts.

By introducing our cloud-based solution, it will enable each hospital to access a larger pool of doctors and tackle the building pressure on our NHS healthcare professionals.

Since Locum’s Nest was launched, our team has been working hard to bridge the communication gap within the NHS. We have created collaborative staff banks, generated dramatic cost savings and heavily reduced manual administration within people management. Here, we share how, by advancing the synergy between hospital managers and frontline workers, the NHS can bring a sense of unity and enhance overall employee wellbeing.

As ambassadors for digital healthcare innovation, we’re proud to sponsor this year’s HR Analytics Award, a category that recognises the value of workforce data to deliver insights, better decision-making and, ultimately, safer wards and improved patient care. Many submissions were received, each demonstrating the creativity and commitment of HR & OD teams across the country.

Over the years we’ve become experts in applying and evaluating best practices when it comes to managing staff banks. In this article, we explore specific techniques to allow rapid bank growth and engagement over the August Changeover period.

In the second episode of our new video series, ‘Designing for HealthTech’, our Co-Founder, Dr Nicholas Andreou, and Head of Design, Jason Peart, discuss how, through thoughtful design, Locum’s Nest has created a truly empathetic user experience, contributing to our users’ peace of mind as well as building the ultimate destination for flexible, empowered shift work.

Not afraid to challenge the status quo, ASPH teamed up with Locum’s Nest and Rotageek to pioneer a new way to roster their staff. We invited Debbie Beck, Workforce Deployment Systems Project Manager, and Coleen Sherlock, Assistant HR Director, to discuss how they championed rostering innovation in an online workshop on how the NHS must build a flexible workforce. Here, we share their journey so far.