Staff Bank

A dedicated team of recruitment experts can support you to build a bigger and more sustainable resource pool that extends well beyond your substantive teams, including agency and bank-only workers.

Actively recruiting bank-only workers is critical to reduce the pressure on substantive staff to cover vacant shifts and preserve their morale.

A larger and more varied bank also maintains a healthy level of competition, so rates can be effectively controlled with ‘reduce or replace’ strategies.

The key to maintaining an effective Staff Bank is communication, keeping regular contact with workers to ensure they stay actively involved with the bank and remain compliant. An onsite team, with instant visibility over your vacant shifts can take a proactive, ‘hands-on’ booking approach.

Bank workers need to know that someone is there on site or at the end of a phone to support, appreciate them and understand their priorities. Using empathy to build a rapport with the staff you need to rely on to fill extra shifts is critical, as even the most dedicated of workers often need some convincing to spend a Saturday night in A&E.

Our onsite bank teams continually gather and analyse data so they can understand exactly what is driving demand and map and predict regular patterns or spikes.

This detailed and data-driven understanding allows us to work more planning into the booking process, better match capacity to meet known fluctuations, and identify and fix inefficient processes.

Our Envoy system ‘intelligently matches’ bank workers to shifts, based on multiple factors including their skills, preferences and recent experience in specific departments. A human factor extends the value of these systems even further. Our onsite teams can improve workforce utilisation significantly by promoting multi-specialty working.

This benefits clinicians keen to broaden their experience beyond their core specialty and maximises the capacity of the bank (over 40% of our clinical bank workers cover one or more specialties). Our teams also ensure that opportunities to book the same workers into regular shift patterns (and preserve continuity of care) are not missed.

Embedding change is never easy. Time needs to be spent, well beyond implementation phases, explaining, reassuring and supporting staff to ensure everyone holds firm to the plan.

Engagement is the key to this, agreeing, communicating and reinforcing rate strategies and authorisation protocols across all internal staffing levels with full support from leadership teams. Without people to drive this, adherence to new protocols is likely to slip, impacting rates and fill.

Our recruitment experts can help you maximise candidate availability by keeping on top of bank compliance. Regular clinical audits identify workers with imminent compliance issues (e.g. certifications due to lapse or appraisals needed), so action can be taken early to maintain their workable status.

Often bank workers need chasing to provide necessary documentation, and being able to do that on site, in person, or quickly take a certified photocopy, saves time and effort on both sides.