Ashford and St Peter’s NHS Trust have successfully integrated their Electronic Staff Records system with their MAPS Healthroster staff rostering system, provided by Manpower Software.
The trust have introduced the system, which provides an integrated up-to-date view on staff working times, attendance and absence, to reduce the administrative workload for ward managers to electronically monitor staff’s shift patterns and attendance.
The trust’s resource manager, Cathy Dennis, told E-Health Insider: “We wanted to develop an interface between out rostering system and our payroll system that would eliminate the need for staff to fill in paper time sheets and ward managers having to verify their paperwork and re-key it onto the system.”
Once Manpower had come up with the idea of a new interface, the trust had to get board approval for the work involved.
Ashford and St Peter’s finance director, Keith Mansfield said: “We identified significant areas of benefit that included reducing the effort associated with producing the pay source data for NHS staff, as generating this data manually is time consuming and error prone. A new system would also provide an electronic audit-trial of the source of pay data for NHS employees enabling a better and quicker analysis and importantly would reduce duplication of entry of HR information between the two systems”.
Manpower Software spent months working on the new interface and following a detailed period of testing involving the trust, the interface team and the development team, the integrated system went live last week.
Dennis told EHI: “The system is wonderful. It frees up the ward sisters clinical time and reduces the burden of paperwork. The ward sister can comfortably focus on clinical matters whilst a secretarial assistant inputs staff attendance information directly into the system. It has been a significant improvement for us, particularly with the amount of time human resources data used to take to enter and verify.”
Using the system, staff tell assistants when they are starting and ending work and the details are entered electronically immediately. Ward sisters have full access to the password-protected system and must then verify the information stored in the database before sending it to payroll.
Dennis added: “It means that nurses can observe staff working patterns and not have to check through tedious amounts of paper timesheets. The pay source data can then be sent to payroll and it will help to reduce salary errors and keep staff happy too. We have already successfully paid 683 staff using the system and will add more wards onto the interface every month.”
The system is security-protected to avoid any unauthorised manipulation of data and any unusual shift patterns are checked before being sent to payroll.
Dennis said: “We worked on this project to ensure that it met the clinical governance rules and did not compromise patient safety. It is updated daily and we thoroughly check each and every piece of data entered into the system. It is password protected so once entered, only authorised users can send data to payroll. For our staff, the ward managers and sisters find it is the biggest boost of all, reducing their previous administrative burdens.”
Manpower Software hope that more of its NHS customers will choose to deploy this interface. The company’s healthcare director, Paul Scandrett, said: “I am delighted with the result for the trust after a lot of hard work from all participants. We are proud to have a MAPS Healthroster working interface to ESR in a ‘live’ environment on ‘live’ staff records.”
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