The Client

Rotherham Hospital is one of five sites at The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust; one of the first of 35 Trusts to achieve NHS Foundation Trust status, awarded the title in 2005. Serving a local population of approximately 252,000, the forward-thinking Trust continues to grow at pace, with around 55,000 inpatients and 230,000 outpatients each year.

The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust is committed to implementing a vision that integrates hospital and community services to empower its clinicians and managers to deliver real benefits to patients and their carers.

Alongside its clinical work, the Trust is an Associate Teaching Hospital for the University of Sheffield and has an active research programme delivered through local, regional, national and international research networks and consortia.

Medical students receive this training at The Rotherham Medical Education Centre, based at Rotherham Hospital. The centre comprises a lecture theatre which seats 100 people, three seminar rooms, resuscitation and manual handling training rooms, a clinical skills lab and a simulation suite. As well as hosting students, the centre also contributes to regional and local training programmes covering a wide range of specialties and healthcare professionals.

The Requirement

In the run up to 2020, the needs of other facilities at Woodside and at Rotherham Community Health Centre (RCHC) were changing. The facilities were frequently being used for meetings and training programmes. The booking application and server used by RCHC was out of date, which posed a security risk. The application was also no longer supported on the IT systems, making it unusable.

In total the Education Centre was receiving up to 100 bookings a day. Demand was increasing but oversight of room availability was difficult, particularly across both sites. Following cancellations or missed appointments, rooms were not released quickly. BookWise Education was already installed at the Education Centre in the hospital grounds, covering 22 rooms since 2003. A manual system using an Outlook calendar with limited staff access was in place at Rotherham Community Health Centre. A secure, cross-site standardised system was needed to boost visibility of the availability of all training rooms, fully utilising the facilities.

The Challenge

BookWise Education had been used by the Trust for 17 years. In 2020, The Trust decided to upgrade to the latest ‘Elements’ system. This upgrade allowed multiple sites to be added to one installation, making it perfect for The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust’s needs.

Alongside a total system upgrade, a whole new site with 16 rooms was added. This required a manual process to transfer existing room use data from Rotherham Community Health Centre onto the new software. Though this action is challenging, it is essential in order for the Trust to have a full and transparent overview of its meeting/training facilities, the team from BookWise assisted in this process as part of its on-boarding procedure.

The Solution

The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust chose a cloud-hosted system, with additional modules including Intranet, Screens and Mail. This further expands BookWise’ s capabilities, integrating with digital screens for fast registration, sending out automated appointment reminders and more. Unlimited logins were created, empowering more staff to arrange room or training bookings without the need for a lengthy administrative process.

The Process

Health Informatics agreed to co fund the upgrade, after PGME highlighted the potential benefits and functionality within the new Elements platform. This also gave the Trust an opportunity to standardise the room booking system by including additional Woodside rooms and meeting/training rooms within RCHC building.

Staff were identified for training, which was provided by both BookWise and Debbie Harrison. All additional rooms to be migrated were identified along with their current bookings, and subsequently were manually migrated to the new platform by the Team.

Trust communications were published advising all users of the new BookWise Elements platform, cut-off date for the use of old systems and included all relevant training material as produced by the PGME Team. The team then continued to monitor old booking systems ensuring nothing was missed.

After adding the new site in January 2020, the upgrade of the initial system, including staff training, was completed by summer of 2020.

The Result

Debbie Harrison, Medical Education Manager and Nicola Allen, Project Support Officer worked closely with the BookWise team. With Nicola leading on the implementation of the new site software and Debbie training necessary staff.

Debbie said: “All staff are now encouraged to book rooms for meetings or training online using the virtual portal and check the availability of the room they’d like without the need for phone calls or emails. Previously, in Rotherham Community Health Centre, it was impossible for staff other than the admin team to view room availability. Now, it’s completely transparent to book the best room for your needs from either of our sites.”

“Our team uses BookWise Elements for room booking, but there are lots of other features too that really help drive efficiency in our department. One of my favourite functions is the ability to quickly print out door signage every day. A list showing all scheduled appointments for the following day also enables quick planning.

“The reporting is brilliant, and it’s dramatically reduced the time spent producing our Centre Activity Reports, while also offering improved accuracy.”

The standardisation of a single room booking system across all highlighted Trust sites enables staff members to better facilitate meeting around attendee’s needs and room availability.

The screens module functionality enables users to see, at a glance, where a meeting/training is being held. This in turn is helpful if the reception staff are unavailable or otherwise engaged.

Calls to PGME staff regarding room availability are reduced, freeing up their time for other duties.

Reporting functionalities within the system enables dedicated reports.

With RCHC moving to the new booking system, a potential security risk has been mitigated and now, the old room booking server has been decommissioned.

Blog