Blog

The Client

Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust runs Kingston Hospital - a district general hospital, caring for around 350,000 people in the surrounding area including Kingston, Richmond, Roehampton, Putney and East Elmbridge. The hospital has approximately 520 beds, employing around 2,900 staff directly with a further 300 contract staff.

In the last year the Trust saw over 127,000 patients in A&E, undertook almost 444,500 outpatient appointments and cared for more than 67,000 admitted patients. The maternity unit delivered over 4,900 babies.

Alongside the clinical work, Kingston Hospital also has an education centre based at the site. Using a number of meeting rooms, simulation suites and lecture theatres, it helps to deliver critical internal training to its staff across all departments, as well as acting as a base to hold meetings, interviews and more.

The Requirement

The education centre comprises 8 seminar rooms, 3 lecture theatres, a simulation suite, a full resuscitation suite, a clinical skills room and a mock ward. A basic system using Microsoft Outlook Calendar was previously used to book each of these rooms. Anyone looking to make a booking was required to call or email the reception staff to specify the dates and times they needed. The calendar was then checked, and requests were booked in manually, subject to availability.

An individual calendar was created in Microsoft Outlook for each room in the centre in order to manage the process. This often led to rooms being double booked, as it was difficult to see a clear overview of each room’s schedule. As a result, time and resources at the centre weren’t used efficiently.

Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust realised that it needed to purchase a bespoke room booking system to utilise the facilities better while also freeing up workload for reception staff, who were trying to manage the time-consuming Microsoft Outlook calendar.

The Challenge

Though the Trust was already using a form of a digital system to book its rooms, the migration of the existing data was a challenge. Information about the rooms at the centre, and the future bookings that were already scheduled, were manually inputted into the BookWise software to ensure maximum functionality of the new system once in place. To aid the process, the team at BookWise fully trained all relevant staff to ensure they could transfer existing bookings efficiently.

The Solution

A reliable and transparent solution, capable of managing the capacity of multiple rooms, was required, so the Trust chose BookWise Elements for its education centre. This increased efficiency in a number of ways; it allowed specified and frequent users to book the rooms directly, reducing the time spent on administrative tasks by reception staff. The software also gave the Trust a clear overview of all existing and upcoming room bookings at any time, reducing the risk of double bookings or misuse of facilities.

The Process

Once the decision was made to purchase, the entire process only took six months to trial, test, train and implement. This period involved the Trust working with BookWise to design the system with features it needed in order to generate the best results.

BookWise gave comprehensive training to two main users of the software, who then ran internal training sessions for the other members of staff that would also be using the system.

The Trust opted to have 35 full users, which is a larger amount than other typical Elements installations. To enable this, it created its own Trust-wide Terms and Conditions that would ensure proper use of the system and prevent mistakes that would impact its effectiveness.

A user guide was also uploaded to the Intranet for other secondary users to refer to when using the software.

The Result

With BookWise Elements it is not possible for rooms to be double booked, removing the potential of diary clashes while managing staff time better, reducing stress and increasing efficiency within the department. A module has also been installed which sends email reminders to those who had booked a room, which helps to minimise no shows by encouraging cancellations for team-members who can no longer make their booking.

With a simple request and approval process, the administration team’s workload is reduced, allowing them to spend their time working on other critical tasks.

8002 live bookings have been recorded between September 2018 and today, 7th October 2019. Almost all (99%) of these bookings have been internal, as the Trust does not currently promote its rooms externally.