UK Hospitals Use Salesforce and Sirenum to Combat Fatigue, Ensure Safety During COVID-19
Guy’s and St. Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust is an NHS foundation trust of the English National Health Service (a publicly funded healthcare system in England), and with approximately 17,000 staff and 2.6 million patient contacts a year, it’s one of the largest hospital trusts in the country. If the name sounds familiar, one of the hospitals they operate, St. Thomas’ Hospital, is where UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson was recently treated for COVID-19.
Confidence in staff even in the best of times is critical for healthcare organizations, and during a crisis, the challenge is even greater. Guy’s and St. Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust is leveraging Sirenum, built on the Salesforce platform, to manage workforce fatigue — saving time while saving lives. To learn more about this story and technology’s impact, we spoke with Joshua Pines, co-founder of Sirenum.
What COVID-19 challenges were Guy’s and St. Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust experiencing?
Joshua Pines: The challenges hospitals are facing in COVID-19 hotspots — including Guy’s and St. Thomas’ — come down to two major issues: hospital workers are getting sick from the virus, and the need to separate COVID and non-COVID wards and their associated personnel.
One of the primary factors among those getting sick is their fatigue. We see in Italy, China, and the UK that when medical professionals are fatigued in a crisis environment, they are more likely to make poor decisions, including they don’t handle their PPE properly. This increases the rate of infection and, sadly, the mortality rate of both patients and staff. This leads to a constant shortage of personnel on site, and having the right amount of the right kind of staff in place is paramount.
What technology did Guy’s and St. Thomas’ put into action to help combat these challenges?
Pines: Guy’s and St. Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust was up and running with our Sirenum for COVID-19 Staff Management solution in just 48 hours. With this solution, Guy’s and St. Thomas’ ensures maximum personnel coverage while minimizing fatigue and optimizing shift distribution. Built into the solution is real-time fatigue management based on the UK HSE guidelines, and this helps administrators keep their staff from reaching dangerous levels of fatigue. The scheduling engine also has embedded compliance rules, making sure that any replacement needed has the appropriate skills and certifications. All of this means that Guy’s and St. Thomas’ can spend less time in the minutiae of keeping its hospitals staffed properly and safely, and more time caring for patients.
To have a workforce in a complex place like a hospital up and running on a solution in 48 hours is remarkable. How is this possible?
Pines: Sirenum is deeply indebted to Salesforce for this solution and the ability to deploy it for Guy’s and St. Thomas’ Trust so quickly. On the non-technical side, we worked with Salesforce to secure COVID-19 specific SKUs to allow three months free for COVID-19 impacted customers. This is an enormous help for organizations like hospitals, care homes, and volunteer orgs because there’s not a lengthy procurement phase. It’s all about moving fast to save lives.
Also, from a development standpoint, Sirenum was able to respond with a COVID-specific solution so quickly because we were built on the Salesforce platform. We were able to evolve our product with hospital and health care specific templates, labels, and more in just days. We also are able to leverage the powerful Salesforce analytics suite without a single line of code. And, with Salesforce infrastructure underpinning our solution, no hospital is ever concerned with our product’s safety, security, or scalability.
What impact has Guy’s and St. Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust seen with this technology?
Pines: What’s most important to us is how our customers feel. Dr. Azra Zyada, Crisis Operations Director for Guy’s and St. Thomas’, shared, “Sirenum is a powerful tool for both rostering staff dynamically and tracking individual staff outputs. It enables us to see the impact of workforce decisions during the pandemic in real time, which is invaluable when resources need to be agile. I cannot praise the dedication and professionalism of the Sirenum team enough. They have truly stepped up to help the NHS during this difficult time.”
Additionally, Guy’s and St. Thomas’ shared that since implementing Sirenum, there’s been dramatically reduced fatigue and 100% shift coverage. They are using this technology to make it possible to continue business-as-usual activities, communicate more reliably with staff, and the MySirenum mobile app makes it easy for workers to accept, start, and end shifts, plus report self-isolation.
Check out Sirenum’s workforce management solution on AppExchange, and visit AppExchange’s COVID-19 Resources for Businesses to learn more about ways you can support your employees, customers, and communities during this time.
