Helping the NHS get back to work with staff vaccinations
The need
Tens of thousands of staff are currently off-sick or self-isolating in the NHS due to coronavirus. The race is on to vaccinate NHS staff and get them back to work so that they can support patients through winter illnesses.
The GDE, University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust (UHS) wanted to roll out a solution, fast. The UHS Digital team created a digital-first vaccination planning and tracking system for these urgent appointments. To be complete, the solution needed secure communications capabilities. This was an extra demand on a department with already stretched resources.
UHS contacted Netcall, a trusted tech partner, for help creating a secure digital vaccine consent and reminder solution. This was added to their in-house scheduling systems, to deliver a complete end-to-end solution they envisioned. Each member of staff provides consent to receiving the vaccine treatment and to data share with NHS England. And, with the vaccination requiring two doses, each member of staff will receive a reminder for the next appointment at the appropriate time. This will ensure that treatment is successfully completed.
The team began to collaborate over the requirements on a Friday. Five working days later Netcall provided the vaccine consent and reminder solution for final review. This demonstrates how using the agility of a low-code platform an outcome can be delivered, at short notice in a matter of days.
The outcome
UHS has been able to react quickly and get a solution up and running quickly. And get their staff protected and back to work.
Without low-code and the tech partnership, communicating and reminding staff would have relied on error-prone, paper-based or manual processes. Real-time reporting would be difficult. And, ensuring everyone attended the second vaccination would take considerable effort.
Using low-code to address the important communications and reminders in such a short space of time has been nothing short of revolutionary. The same approach can be applied in future for vaccines and other programmes whether for staff or patients.
Paying forward by sharing the capability
The Netcall User Community is growing, and our on-going investment in the public sector includes sharing solutions with customers. Vaccinations are an urgent national concern. Netcall is aware that many NHS Trusts won’t have the deep technical specialist capabilities of UHS Digital.
Investing to support the NHS, Netcall created an end-to-end Vaccination application. We have added our scheduling and tracking capability to the secure digital vaccine consent and reminder solution used by UHS. The combined capability provides a full Vaccination App for other NHS Trusts to use.
This Netcall Vaccinations App has the following functionality:
- The Trust creates the number of appointment slots they need.
- There are parallel time-slots for several vaccinators working at the same time across many locations.
- Those to be vaccinated can use any device as the responsive capability is browser-based.
- Each staff member will be booked in for two vaccinations, at the appropriate time, by their line manager.
- The appointment details are sent to them along with the consent to the vaccination.
- Automated reminders are sent to staff ahead of each of the two appointments.
- On the vaccination date, the person will be marked as attended, or DNA.
Centralised real-time reporting keeps management updated with a complete picture of the vaccination programme.
For any NHS Trust, this app will allow them to plan and manage the roll-out of COVID vaccines. Their staff will be protected and back at work in the most efficient and productive way.
If you’d like to download this app or to learn how Liberty Create, our low-code platform, can help you to address similar process automation requirements, please contact us.
Contact us
