TotalMobile™ is urging the next government to look at mobile working to boost NHS nursing hours, in answer to a call for a recruitment drive on nursing staff in the NHS.
The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has said there are fewer nurses now than there were back in 2010, if you include midwives, health visitors and school nurses in the equation. Resources are stretched in the NHS and current nursing levels can’t cope and with an aging population and people with long term illnesses living longer – the situation is only going to escalate.
“Of course we agree with the RCN and employing new nurses in the short term will have an impact, but there has to be a period of transformation and we need to look to mobile technology to iron out efficiencies in the system,” commented Colin Reid, CEO of TotalMobile. “You need to take a look at the telescope from the other end, look at the current nursing workforce and their daily practices. There are vast inefficiencies in the working nurse’s standard day, such as excessive paperwork, which takes up time that could be better spent with patients”.
When effectively deployed, mobile technology is proven to save between 1 and 2 hours per nurse per day. According to the RCN, a low end band six nurse earns £25,783 per year. Taking National Insure and pension contributions into consideration, saving an hour out of their day by using mobile technology would equate to a saving of £16.89 per nurse per day. On a group of 1,000 nurses that would be a saving approximately of £4.4 million a year.
Mobile working would not only save money, but also valuable time. An hour per day saved on a single nurse’s day equates to an additional 133 nurses if you look at that time saving for 1,000 nurses. If these figures were based on the common saving of 2 hours per day, then NHS Trusts could save almost £8.8 million a year, experiencing an increase in workforce capacity of over 25%
“These are very significant savings and for this reason it is imperative the new government runs with mobile technology in the NHS to help create a sustainable, long term nursing strategy,” added Reid.
Community nursing has been one of the big areas to suffer under the nursing shortage. The RCN said that the community nursing workforce has been cut by more than 3,300, despite NHS plans to move care from hospital into the community. “The NHS wants to deliver more care within the community, mobile working is ideally suited to such a strategy. It enables nurses to spend more time caring for patients as they only have to record information once, at the point of patient contact, as opposed to having to spend lengthy and inefficient trips back to the office to input data”.
About TotalMobile
TotalMobile has been successfully developing and selling enterprise software for more than 25 years, initially as TASK Software, then since 2001 as Consilium Technologies and now as TotalMobile Ltd.
Today, TotalMobile provides mobile working solutions to a range of Government, Private Sector and Healthcare customers in the US and Europe, as well as throughout the UK and Ireland.
