With over 20 years of health care workforce and managerial experience gained in the UK, Middle East and Ireland, and posts in Medical HR, two Strategic Health Authorities, the North Western Deanery and three consultancy firms; Teamwork Management Services, Mott MacDonald and Kendall Bluck (formerly Zircadian consulting), Matthew Bluck has developed workforce methodologies that align staff to activity and are designed to improve patient care, improve work life balance for staff and provide the most efficient services whilst maintaining the focus on patient care.
These methodologies are delivered in partnership with a team of workforce specialist associates, who are all current practitioners in Nursing, Medicine, Professions Allied to Medicine, Financial Management and Data Analysis.
We believe our methodology in partnership with our clinical and professional credibility and understanding, is the only way to develop workforce plans that deliver, and can be applied to all specialties and departments.
To date we have applied this to a significant amount of successful reviews including: Emergency Departments; Paediatrics; reconfiguration projects; Radiology; Maternity Services; Sports Medicine Physiotherapy; Surgical and Medical Specialties; and Anaesthetics.
Over the past few months we’ve been working on a secret project. Now we’re excited to finally be able to reveal what we’ve had under wraps…
Kendall Bluck have created the Pennine Messenger app, a tool created to help the busy days of NHS professionals run smoother.
The methodology aligns staff to activity using real trust data, which is analysed day by day, 365 days per year and reviewed and assessed by practicing clinicians.
This analysis and clinical opinion provides Trusts with monthly rosters for their departments area by area – a workforce and leave management plan which ensures that departments are staffed appropriately 365 days a year and can cope with the peaks of activity.
This will undoubtedly improve/maintain standards of patient care, relieve pressure on staff, and reduce agency spending and panic agency bookings during the winter months.
Consultants, Radiographers, Sonographers and Radiology Managers are facing considerable pressures with what feels like relentless growth in requests for imaging. Detailed analysis and job plan reviews can identify where there pressures are in the system, test by test, and allow a refinement of the workforce planning which will not only ease the pressure on staff, reduce any inefficiencies but improve access for patients to this critical service.
Through partnership with the clinical leads and interviews with all available staff, issues are identified and plans developed. These may be recruitment plans, revised timetabling or exploring extended roles.
We also have experience of supporting Trusts in successful resolution of pay banding appeals and recruitment of both Junior Doctors and Consultants.
We are therefore able to offer: Job plan reviews across all specialities which include alignment of workforce to activity and team job planning; Junior Doctor rota design and review; Monitoring analysis; Pay banding appeal support; and reviews of Trust medical staffing functions.
We have access to both the clinicians working on the front line as ward sisters and managers and the analytical capability to deliver bespoke nurse staffing reviews that consider all the elements specific to a Trust.
Our reviews keep patient care at the centre whilst producing the most efficient workforce plans for Trusts.