Nottingham CityCare Partnership
Hallam Medical meet increasing demand for Community Services
Hallam Medical and Nottingham CityCare Partnership
Nottingham CityCare Partnership (CityCare) is an award-winning Community Health services provider, dedicated to working in partnership with the NHS to improve long-term patient health and well-being.
Background
As a Social Enterprise, CityCare invest all profits back into front line services, patient care, staff training and community benefit projects.
Currently commissioned to deliver to over 65 healthcare services, CityCare offer a wide mix of Community NHS services in a variety of locations including Health Centres, Children’s Centres, GP Practices and other Community settings.
CityCare continues to grow through meeting the increasing demands for Admission Avoidance via a number of Community services.
Following our continued support of the CityCare Walk-in Centre with Advanced Nurse Practitioners, we have now extended our support to cover the increased demand for Community services with the provision of specialist Community Nurses at Bands 5, 6, 7 and 8a.
The Challenge
To provide high quality, readily available and reliable agency staff to support Nottingham CityCare Partnership Community services, and the ever increasing demand upon those services. The solution must be cost effective and deliver high volume requirement within short time scales.
Demand required x25 FTE fully compliant and appropriately experienced Community Nurses to be provided at short notice for the following services:
- Walk-in Centre (Band 7)
- Patient Flow Team (Band 7)
- Respiratory Specialist Nursing Team (Band 7)
- Care Home Advanced Practitioners (Band 7)
- Reablement/Intermediate Care Team (Band 6)
- Community Nursing Services Teams (Band 5)
- Care Home Nursing Team (Band 5)
Action
Working closely with the individual Service Managers and Clinical Leads at CityCare, we developed a full understanding of each service and the specific skill sets required, including:
- Fully autonomous Advanced Nurse Practitioners to see, treat, diagnose and refer patients with undifferentiated and undiagnosed conditions (Walk-in Centre
- Patient assessment skills and Community experience (Patient Flow Team)
- Rehabilitation and Community experience for (Reablement/Intermediate Care Team)
- Experience and qualification in Management of Respiratory conditions such as COPD, Asthma, Spirometry (Respiratory Specialist Nursing Team)
- Requirements clear, we worked in partnership with the Nottingham CityCare Procurement Team, as an exclusive Tier 1 agency to develop a specific recruitment model to deliver support across all of their community services.
Ramp up targets were identified as an initial x8 FTE (Day 1) increasing to x18 FTE (Week 4) and continuing to a full x25 FTE (Week 12).
Hallam Medical have consistently provided our Walk-in Centre with a very high standard of reliable Advanced Nurse Practitioners to ensure we can continuously deliver the service. We have a very strong relationship with Hallam Medical and rely on them for both planned and unplanned absences and the delivery of new services. One example of this is the Acute Visiting Service. Hallam were able to secure fully compliant and experienced staff extremely quickly, thereby ensuring we could commence a new service within a very short time scale. Hallam are supporting numerous other Nottingham CityCare Partnership services and we are very pleased to be working with a professional organisation that understands us, our services and the type of staff we need. Most importantly Hallam always puts compliance at the top of their agenda which is essential.
Practice Development Nurse at Nottingham CityCare Partnership
Outcomes
This approach allowed Hallam Medical to meet the increasing demand for Community services for CityCare resulting in many positive outcomes including:
- Enable the delivery of Community services in line with CCG and patient demand
- Streamlined communication and recruitment process allowing for rapid staff ramp up for new services
- Enhanced service delivery and patient outcomes
- Financial savings via standardised pay and charge rates
- Time/efficiency savings via streamlined processes for management equivalent to x4 days per month
- Consistent high quality agency staff providing continuity of patient care and high staff retention
- Accurate skill matching of Nurses to services based on a detailed understanding of requirements
- Real-time Management Intelligence (MI) providing hours, fill rates and actual/forecast costings
- Compliance and Clinical Governance from an LPP National Framework approved agency supplier
- Total transparency and control over temporary workforce
