Devon Partnership NHS Trust

Challenge

The NHS faces persistent challenges to keep costs at a minimum and is under pressure to manage an ever growing workload due to increased requirements around patient care. To confront these testing conditions, the Devon Partnership NHS Trust initiated a ‘SMART’ programme to look across the entire Trust to find ways of improving processes and systems to deliver efficiencies to maximise the value received from their systems locally.

To deal with growing patient numbers, the Trust was moving towards new larger ‘clinical hubs’ – and this was the perfect opportunity to integrate a safe and secure room and resource booking system that would be cost effective to manage and could scale with them as they grew. The Trust was looking for a system that could be quickly implemented and maintain a range of requirements including internal room booking, car parking and hot desk booking right through to reserving ‘clinical rooms’ for patients and consultants – with an engaging experience that would ensure full buy-in across the organisation.

A single system for all resources

Meeting rooms, hot desks, car parks and clinical consulting rooms are all bookable through one centralised solution via an easy to use app. Due to the variety of security settings available to NHS administrators – the system is tailored, so the right people see the right resources and users only see what’s appropriate for their role at any one time.

Centralised easy administration

The Trust works with tight budgets and did not want a system that required maintenance either internally or externally or one that needed supplier involvement for every single change made to the solution. Matrix Booking was the perfect fit – it’s designed so administrators and staff use the same interface, with the former having a few more options available to them.

However, these options provide a wealth of configuration and availability settings that can be adjusted for each resource, ranging from adding room layouts and facilities, setting up new catering suppliers and catering options through to management of availability and hours for each room or desk.

The software also streamlines visitor management systems as it has been built to incorporate the processes involved in the safety and security of visitors to a facility. The system allows smart digital signage, with kiosk and applications that are tailored for your visitors to sign-in, sign-out and book resources as required. Our booking system offers a solution to visitor management challenges and needs by storing information securely in a single system. By utilising Matrix Booking, visitors to The Trust’s facilities are provided with a modern and time efficient check-in process.

The system is tuned and set up ready to use and then as the business evolves the administrators can adapt the system themselves at no extra cost. Of course, the Matrix Booking Support Team is always on hand to deal with any questions or offer advice on the best way to complete a task, and as it’s a SaaS Cloud service, this is all included within the overall licence costs.

Less paper, less waste and less opportunity for error

Matrix Booking allows offices and reception areas to run entirely paper free and includes a built in reporting feature, which can be tailored to include or exclude data such as rooms, buildings or date ranges – available to use immediately. If there isn’t a ready built report for specific needs, the data can be easily exported at the click of a button to create your own.

Daily agendas, visitor management lists, room utilisation or bookings can be categorised by cost codes or users and can be viewed in real-time on screen, avoiding the need for hard copies.

Andy Clemens, Project Officer at Devon NHS Partnership Trust said: “Using the Matrix Booking system, administrators have a single view across all the main buildings in our estate helping to optimise the use of our resources.”

Ouctome

Matrix Booking is accessible from any computer, laptop, tablet or smartphone and provides users with the ability to run usage reports and allow the relevant people to easily see the day’s schedule of meetings, visitors and patients. The solution has also been instrumental in the launch of several new clinical hubs and by maximising the rooms available, it also promotes improved utilisation of rooms across different buildings within the Trust.

Devon Partnership NHS Trust can now see all meeting rooms, desks, consulting rooms and car parking spaces on a single cloud-based system and by using a multi-tiered security setup, the facilities teams can instantly control who can access and book which resources. “The Matrix Booking suite has proven to be an ideal tool to help manage both our meeting rooms and our new clinic hubs in Devon,” said Andy Clemens. He added: “Using Matrix Booking to schedule and book rooms in our new clinical hubs has helped us optimise the use of our resources to best serve our patients.”