JET5

Integrated IT for Clinical Staff

Electronic Rota Systems

  • 35% of Scottish Anaesthetic Departments have to fill 1 or more short notice trainee rota gaps per week.
  • 19% of Scottish Anaesthetic Departments have to fill trainee rota gaps every day.
  • 98% of these gaps are covered using internal locum arangements.
Stats, RCoA 2016

An Electronic Rota system will facilitate arranging list cover and reduce the impact on the service—delayed list starts while arrangements are made can result in cancelled operations.


What to look for in an Electronic Rota System

Capability

There is a minimum feature-set where you begin to reap the benefits of an electronic rota system. It is essential that staff rotations, daily rota allocations, all forms of leave, and detailed job plans are fully integrated. Only then do you eliminate transcription errors, and streamline all aspects of rota management allowing your Rotamaster(s) to concentrate on creating safe, staff-efficient, and training-effective rotas.

Flexibility

Adopting an electronic rota system should not force you to substantially change the way your department works. An electronic rota system should be able to accommodate your current workflows, so a new system remains familiar and comfortable, minimising startup disruption.

However it is also important not to cling on to existing rota-practices which might reduce the benefits you should enjoy in an electronic system. For example adopting a fixed monthly closing-date for the leave-book allows your Rotamaster(s) time to create the on-call rota—uninterrupted by incoming leave requests.

Regional Scope for Trainees

Transparently allowing trainees to be rotated and shared across multiple hospitals in a region requires a carefully designed and implemented Electronic Rota. This flexibility and broad scope cannot easily be provided by rota-systems which are implemented within individual hospitals and do not also have Regional Scope. JET5 integrates Regional Rotations so staffing in individual hospital departments is always accurate and fully up-to-date.

Key Function: Leave

The two core elements of Electronic Rota leave management are:

  1. The system must ensure each staff member gets the correct amount of leave.
  2. The system must have a mechanism to ensure that overall departmental leave matches service demands.

JET5 implements both of these elements in a manner which comes close to the maximum efficiency that can be achieved. Personal leave calculations are detailed. JET5's leave rules are flexible and involve a system of thresholds that are applied at the level of specific sub-rotas, combined with a powerful system of "time-shifting" which enables the pattern of leave taken to match the pattern of service demands—avoiding the temptation to simply use internal or external paid locums.

A traffic-light system is used: leave below the preset threshold (or that has been manually approved) is green, leave requested pending approval is orange, and leave which has been denied shows in red. The Rotamasters control this process, and have a real-time display of the sessional "pressure" caused by different types of leave.

Key Function: Trainee Work Intensity

The Electronic Rota must provide functions that allow full control over trainee work intensity, both over the short term (when allocating trainees to elective duties JET5 implements a sophisticated pattern of permissible shift patterns); and over the longer term where European Working-Time Directive (EWTD) rules must be respected (JET5 implements a corrected-hours statistic available live to Rotamasters which allows accurate trainee shift-intensity-balancing per month).

The value of a well designed Rota System comes to the fore when balancing mixtures of shift-working and traditional day-time list cover: JET5's Rota Allocation system is designed to make it straightforward for Rotamasters to manage these complex situations both maximising training and simultaneously respecting EWTD constraints.

Value-added functions

All staff frequently sign in to the Electronic Rota system, which makes this a useful place to provide other departmental functions. The Rota System should not be overwhelmed with too much added complexity, but the following facilities can be usefully incorporated:

JET5

JET5 Rota is a large, fully-featured Rota System which was designed from the ground up to meet all the above requirements.