Solent NHS Trust

Background

Solent NHS Trust supplies community, mental health, and learning disability services to people in Hampshire and on the Isle of Wight. They have a dedicated team of over 5,000 employees that deliver person-centred care close to home for people at all stages of their lives. Solent NHS Trust consists of four regions:  

• Portsmouth  
• Southampton 
• Isle of Wight  
• North Hampshire 

Within these regions, they currently have 80 buildings across 14 sites across. These sites consist of 142 rooms (meeting and clinical rooms), 532 desks, and 46 parking spaces.  

Need: a desk and room management solution to support flexible working for the NHS

A 17% increase in their workforce followed by a need to increase office occupancy and monitor occupancy levels were the main drivers for Solent NHS Trust to look for a resource management platform. The response from Mark Young, Deputy Director of Estates and Facilities, was clear – either:  

Sue Adcock, Estates ICT Project Manager, explained: 

“Our Deputy Director of Estates and Facilities redefined building costs to make it clear to our employees by using a tangible comparison. Spending on underutilised resources takes away investment from hiring more healthcare consultants. This comparison mitigated any resistance to approving the need for a desk booking system.”  

Solent NHS Trust currently has a goal of 80% occupancy across their buildings and found that they were falling short of meeting their occupancy targets. They had a system for measuring occupancy, and they started to consider space management software as well as desk and room booking systems to complement their system for measuring occupancy. 

During Covid, Solent NHS Trust expanded its workforce by 17%, which gave them a challenge in terms of managing desks, clinical rooms, and meeting rooms to support this rise. The return to work after Covid was the perfect opportunity for change by implementing a desk and room management system to support hybrid working and make it easy for employees to find and book spaces on the go. 

Solution: a desk booking software to support an expanding workforce 

Solent NHS Trust formed a working group to research offerings in the marketplace. They came across Matrix Booking as it is also used by Hampshire and Isle of Wight Integrated Care Board (ICB). They selected Matrix Booking and two other space management software solutions to evaluate.  

Sue Adcock, commented:  

“For me, there was one overriding decision in choosing Matrix Booking and that was the ease of usability. It was the single most important thing for me. You want to make it as simple as possible for people to engage with new systems. Matrix Booking, it reminded me of my first iPhone – I just picked it up and straight away I knew how to use it.” 

Initially, Solent NHS Trust implemented Matrix Booking at their headquarters for desk and meeting room bookings. They also trialled consulting room bookings in one of their newest outpatient hospitals. After this, Matrix Booking was approved for rollout across 12 sites during 2023 and into 2024.  

In addition to desk and room booking, Solent NHS Trust has recently added Matrix Bookings’ parking management software to one of their sites. Responding rapidly to a request from their landlord, Solent NHS Trust implemented the Matrix Booking car park management system within two days. This is something that they are also looking to roll out to other sites soon to manage where car parking is limited or where access barriers are in place.  

Outcome: data to help make informed decisions about the future estate

The Estates team at Solent NHS Trust had noticed an increase in occupancy levels since they started using Matrix Booking. They expect that when resources are limited, that will be the primary factor driving an increase in bookings.  

The utilisation data that Matrix Booking provides has helped in making resource management decisions. Sue Adcock explained:  

“The Matrix Booking system alone isn’t going to improve occupancy rates. What the Matrix Booking system will do is give us data about our utilisation rates. This enables us, as a trust, to evaluate any feedback from services around capacity. Using the data that Matrix Booking provides us with means that we can validate requests for additional office space. In some cases, we can show that our current spaces aren’t being fully utilised which we can address, this may remove the need for additional buildings.” 

One example provided by Steve Scutchings, Site Operations Manager, includes a site that previously had 160 desks. The data from Matrix Booking showed over time that there was a greater need for more meeting spaces than desks as a result, Solent NHS Trust removed 30 desks and replaced them with an extra meeting room, supplying a space more suitable for the requirements employees have for it. This has meant that Solent NHS Trust has been able to stop using an external corporate meeting space for this site at a saving of about £65k per year. 

Cross-organisational resource sharing – a connected NHS estate

The ICB, which oversees all the trusts in the region, wanted to work more closely with Solent NHS Trust to improve collaboration between the organisations. The unique Matrix Booking cross-organisational resource sharing functionality was recently introduced between Solent NHS Trust and the ICB. This offers a connected workspace by enabling ICB employees to book resources easily and securely within the Solent NHS Trust estate without the need to access Solent NHS Trusts Matrix Booking system or network directly.  

Cross-organisational resource sharing is something that Solent NHS Trust is also rolling out to work more closely with other organisations in the region, including Isle of Wight NHS, to:  

Insight and advice

Looking back on Solent NHS Trust’s implementation of Matrix Booking, Sue’s insight might help anyone who is looking at introducing resource management software and the challenges that it could bring:  

“The single hardest thing is to get the cultural changes and to get people onboard. Bring in a working group, taking people from various functions to trial the software. I think once they do this, they will see how easy Matrix Booking is to use and this will help to bring the organisation on a journey with you.”