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The Client

Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT) is one of the largest acute Trusts in the UK, running a family of nine hospitals across six separate sites, providing a wide range of services from comprehensive local general hospital care through to highly specialised regional and national services.

The Trust education facilities include the Education and Research Centre and the Simulation and Human Factors Centre, both based at Wythenshawe Hospital and Education North and South, based at the Oxford Road site.

These facilities form an integral part of the Trust’s operations, providing services and support for the education, training and professional development of clinical and non-clinical staff and students to help achieve their maximum potential in delivering high quality healthcare and current good practice.

The Requirement

The Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust was formed as part of a merger.  In October 2017, Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and The University Hospital of South Manchester NHS Foundation Trust combined to create the new organisation.

As the two trusts merged staff at the Education centres needed an education room booking system that would enable consistency across the Trust; staff at all nine hospitals would need central access to the education and training facilities. Furthermore, the system needed to feature a simple search function to enable quick and easy room requests.

The Challenge

The Education campus teams (Oxford Road Campus and Wythenshawe Hospital) were using different digital booking systems, so a fully integrated, streamlined solution was needed to create a single point of access. The previous Wythenshawe method comprised of in-house digital room booking request form that were submitted via intranet, requiring clerical staff to input the data into the system manually, in order to allocate rooms.  Although this was more efficient than an offline method that used spreadsheets and paper diaries, the process was still cumbersome and relied heavily on clerical staff to accept and manage each room request.

The Oxford Road Campus used a self service electronic room booking system.

The Solution

BookWise Elements was installed and used to manage all Education room bookings.  It was chosen for its ability to manage the room timetables and resources.

The Process

Following receipt of the purchase order number in July 2018, a conference call was set up between BookWise and the Education campus team to explain the data that was needed in order to build the system. Once this data was received, BookWise Elements was set up and the main end users were given an overview of the software and how it would look.

The Education Campus team was ready to transfer their education centres room booking data from the existing system to BookWise Elements after just two months, taking approximately three months to complete the entire process. To do this, on site training was delivered to 15 of the primary users who would be managing the bookings once it was rolled out.

Further online training was then delivered to these users to prepare them for operating the system. The Education Campus team then extended this to the staff that would be requesting the bookings.

BookWise Elements went fully live at the end of November 2018.

The Result

By reducing administrative duties, the software has freed up the capacity of the Education campus team, enabling them to spend more time on other tasks that will further maximize the use of the facilities.

With the search function, an important requirement for the client, staff can quickly confirm and check information on bookings and the availability of the rooms. Furthermore, anyone within the Trust has access to the software, acting as a link between the user and the education facilities. Alongside the room booking software, the Trust has also had a number of upgrades including BookWise Mail and BookWise Intranet, increasing integration amongst the sites and staff, and streamlining the booking process even further.

The department can process a large amount of requests quickly and efficiently, across both sites and approx 53 rooms are registered on the system. In May 2019, 653 room-booking requests were processed successfully.