Making the experience for new staff better

by Trust wide new starter project team 

Team members across people and culture, digital, the registration authority and an end user at ELFT have been working together to apply quality improvement methods to improve the expereince for all new staff starting at ELFT.

New starters have frequently expressed frustration that there was a delay in receiving their ‘smartcard’ which gives access to clinical systems. This is especially important for clinical staff because there are potential patient safety implications.

The team’s aim was to ensure that all new starts had access to their clinical systems within five days. With teamwork, focus and testing changes, the team have now reached their aim which has improved from 27 days and is now within 3.5 days (figure 1.). The team are also showing improvement in the percentage of staff in possession of the smartcard on their first day at work (figure 2.).

The team have tested changing the sequence of processing the smart card to ensure the new staff members receive it before their start date and introducing a checklist for line managers. There has also been a data clean up to ensure the correct data around the issues is accurate so that the team is sure they are truly making an improvement.

Figure 1. Average numbers of days to get set up with access to clinical systems

Figure 2. % Of new starts in possession of a smartcard

A new staff member who started at the beginning of October shared…