What is it?
Establishment Genie is an easy, online tool that helps senior nurses and midwives, in partnership with their non-clinical colleagues, to review, compare, remodel and report their establishments.
- It articulates the case for safe staffing, provides evidence to support professional judgement, and helps you balance your budget.
- It drives workforce planning in line with the Francis recommendations, highlights unwarranted variation in response to the Carter review, and helps trusts to deliver their savings plans safely.
- It generates automatic reports to meet the monthly and six-monthly requirements, saving significant time and giving detailed ward staffing information that you can compare within your hospital and with other Establishment Genie trusts.
There are systems available to help you roster your staff and then react to pressures on the day. We believe there is a gap at the very beginning of the staffing process – in planning and standardising what you need, demonstrating whether it is safe across the week, and defining what it will cost. Establishment Genie walks you through simple but robust planning, to review and develop consistent care that is aligned to budgets.
Simply put, the Genie helps you build fair, safe and affordable establishments.
Why use it?
- Take stock of your establishments and remodel to improve safety or cost
- Deliver cost reduction safely and articulate the relationship between budgets and care levels
- Identify the exact WTE requirement and uplift for each ward and compare this to the budget
- Prepare for, or respond to, inspections by the CQC and other regulators
- Overlay staffing levels with quality indicators to explore trends between staffing and outcomes
- Explore better, cheaper ways of meeting fluctuations in demand, bed numbers and patient mix
- Save time and improve the quality of your monthly and six-monthly safe staffing reports
- Demonstrate compliance with recommendations from the Francis Inquiry, Carter Review and the NQB
- Model the workforce for new roles (e.g. Band 4 Nursing Associates), mergers or reconfiguration of services
How does it work?
The tool guides the user – typically a senior nurse or midwife – through easy to use screens, and it takes just 20-30 minutes to enter the simple information for a typical ward – things like shift timings, beds, budgets and spend on bank and agency. Once the data is entered, the team is ready to:
- Review the current WTE requirement, uplift, position against budget and the use of bank, agency and specials, alongside detailed staffing metrics that show planned care levels at 8-hourly intervals day and night, weekday and weekend. Exceptions against any care standards set by the trust are flagged for attention.
- Compare the ward with other wards in your hospital, or at other Establishment Genie trusts, on staffing metrics. You can overlay this with outcomes for patients (e.g. from the safety thermometer), staff (e.g. vacancy and turnover) and operational outcomes (e.g. delayed transfers).
- Remodel to address any areas of concern around safety and quality, for lower costs and cheaper ways of meeting demand (e.g. more cost effective resourcing of specialling, explore the effect of new roles), or to meet changes in activity or restructuring.
- Report, using summary and detailed automated PDF reports that allow you to add commentary to express issues, explain decisions, articulate risks and describe action plans. The reports are also designed to automate the production of the mandatory monthly and six-monthly safe staffing report, which saves senior staff time and gives a high quality output.