UKvsCOVIDHack: Developing an app to help NHS staff track absences

Welcome to “NHS Roll Call”, our project that aims to help the NHS improve the efficiency of its day-to-day roll call during this unprecedented time. We’re undertaking this project at a hackathon organised by Women Driven Development and Covid-19 Mutual Aid UK during this long Easter weekend.

After a few sessions with NHS front line workers, we identified some key issues regarding the NHS’s current roll call process:

• Staff rota process is manual and complicated
• Rotas are only available on the hospital intranet
• Reporting employee sickness is arduous
• NHS has no way to track reasons for staff absence

To address these issues, we decided to create a mobile app that improves efficiency and transparency by achieving the following:

A prototype of the NHS Roll Call App designed by Naomi

• Facilitating administrator communication
• Allowing staff to view rota outside of the hospital
• Capturing reasons for absences and anticipated return-to-work dates
• Alerting administrators to staff absences immediately
• Enabling teams to pick up shifts
• Serving as a one-stop-shop for resourcing for three months

For greater ease of data visualisation, we used Power BI to develop an absence report for the NHS Admin Team. Team members can filter for the individual’s absence date and hospital. The report then gives them an overview of the individual’s role, the absence reasons, etc.

A Power BI report created by Yang

In the ongoing search for a solution to the NHS’s pressing roll call issues, we believe that the NHS Roll Call App and Power BI absence report that we developed during this hackathon will serve as a useful starting point. There is more to be done!

You can find the code here:

Backend: https://github.com/Greyberg/nhs-roll-call-backend
(a simple scala play service)

Frontend: https://github.com/emyrTomos/nhs-roll-call
(A Vue.js app that walks through the wireframes)

Meet our team members!

Naomi is a UX Designer who used to work in museums. https://www.linkedin.com/in/naomigorlov/

Yang is an IT Consultant specialising in Dynamics 365 and Power BI. https://www.linkedin.com/in/yang-liu-796211b1/

Emyr Tomos https://www.linkedin.com/in/emyr-tomos/

Rose

Zarina