Summary The Support Services Department of East Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust undertook investigations to find a suitable system that would provide an efficient and effective method of recording staff attendance. Of the 7000 employees employed across two trusts, 280 are employed by the Support Services department at the Eastbourne Site that have taken the lead to develop a streamlined method of capturing staff hours for payment and management purposes. With the previous manual paper based systems being cumbersome and inaccurate, a new system was critical for the trust to avoid pay errors and provide valuable reporting tools to help the management team. Not only did they want to accurately monitor attended time but also needed to improve absence control and overtime authorisation.		Download Case Study

After a thorough review of the time and attendance solutions available, Eastbourne chose Open Options. Critical to their selection was the products ease of use and intuitive structure and screen layouts, which would allow managers to easily adopt the new solution and move from the ineffective manual systems. Open Options also allowed them to seamlessly link to their payroll system that would enable them to avoid the costly errors that had occurred in the past.

Site Services Manager, Barbara Pellegrino said “the systems quickly highlighted through exceptions the periods of absences, which could have gone un-noticed with the previous system, thus allowing effective management of the Trusts absence Policy. Costs savings have been made and the administrative burden has been reduced from over 16 hours per week to less than 20 minutes per day.

”She added, “Crown has also resolved the problem of payroll reporting by providing an effective method to extract payroll information.The system was very easy to set up and with the excellent guidance of the training and support team we have been able to set up the complex work rules that operate within the trust to ensure these reports are totally accurate”

“The information is comprehensive and in a format that is clear and concise to both read and understand.This has helped us reduce the error rate, always the biggest complaint with manual systems, and the consequences such as dealing with over payments and personnel issues when staff have been paid incorrectly”

Following the implementation of Open Options, East Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust has been able to make considerable cost savings. This is expected to increase further once the system is rolled out to other departments across the 2 sites. A full staff handbook was issued to each employee prior to the system going live which ensured everyone understood how and why Open Options was being introduced. And this paid off with increased staff morale and confidence in the new system especially as work patterns can be set for each individual and they can be assured that their pay will be a true reflection of the hours worked.

Barbara concludes “we are very pleased with Open Options and the benefits we have gained since introducing it to the Support Services Department.We now look forward to the next challenge of introducing the system to other departments across the two trust and welcome the opportunity to share these benefits to other NHS trusts across the country.”

Crown Computing’s Open Options solution is a Nurse Rostering and Attendance Management system that automates the task of NHS Staff Rostering across a Hospital Trust or Region. It provides staff planners with a comprehensive, powerful, flexible, yet easy to use tool, which embraces Roster Planning, Attendance Recording, Absence Management, Access Control, Activity Management and Time Accounting.

Features and capabilities included are:-