Last month we spoke with Ahmed Shahrabani from Locum’s Nest to hear more about the company and its plans for the next 12 months.
Can you tell me about yourself and your organisation?
I am a doctor by trade and co-founder of Locum’s Nest. I was born in Oman in the Gulf of Arabia and moved to delightful Sheffield in South Yorkshire, where I studied at Sheffield medical school before moving down to London to do my foundation year at Epsom St Helier. Then my 2nd foundation year at the Royal Surrey, and then worked for a few years at the Royal Surrey after that.
The story of Locum’s Nest was born in Epsom St Helier, at the trust there were a few of us, myself, Nick – the other co-founder and a few friends who were on the same ward. Every Friday the rota coordinator would come to the ward and ask one of us to cover the afternoon shift on the following Sunday. If the consensus answer was “no” then what followed would be a barrage of texts, emails, phone calls, bleeps to try to find cover as ultimately it is clinical safety that is affected. If no one was found through the full-time employees’ spreadsheet or the bank, the rota coordinator would resort back to phone calls, emails, texts etc to a bunch of local agencies. Basically, it was a process that cost a lot of time and a lot of money, we didn’t like it as the clinicians, the core HR team were spending too many hours with very little luck in finding a doctor.
We thought, there must be a better way of doing this and as with other industries, the idea was born to cut out the middle man with technology. Between us, we spent all year working with the trust to ask the question, ‘what should the solution look like?’.
We built a free to use mobile application for doctors, which had features such as a built in digital passport to allow doctors to cross trust borders – they could input things like their speciality, credibility etc and link it to various calendars and rosters and they would be notified of shifts that matched their requirements 100%. Rather than being bombarded with all jobs available, the application filtered jobs that were only applicable to their skillset.
That was 3 years ago and the application was very different back then to what it is now. Nick and myself did a comprehensive coding course, which taught is one very important skill in that you really need someone who knows how to do it!
Can you talk me through what has happened over the past three years?
We launched in the Royal Surrey in October 2016 with the help of the HR Director at the time, Nicky Hill. We said to Nicky “we have this idea; we promise it will save you a lot of money but also improve patient care.”
She gave us the green light to launch a pilot; we launched in one department and proved its worth quickly and then it went live across the trust over the next few weeks. The great thing about the technology has been that it has brought the trust and us closer together, through harmonisation of pay rates, employment checks and for the first time in NHS history, two trusts staff banks work together, a collaborative was formed and both trusts doubled their staff banks overnight. Doctors love it because they now have the ability to work at other trusts than their own. Other advantages of working together are agency savings, improved duty of care – doctors know their patients demographics better and there are no downsides of working together.
What would you say has been your biggest achievement over the past 12 months?
Without question, it has been this collaborative way of honest and open working in the NHS. It started off with two trusts and has grown to seven trusts who are now working collaboratively across the south of the country; all the way from North Middlesex down to Dorset County, Dorchester to Gloucester and almost everything in between.
There is a super bank of almost 4,000 doctors, free-movement using the digital passport across all of these trusts. People say we are far-fetched and a ludicrous way of thinking but the NHS should have one bank of staff and free movement of doctors to where they are needed which will totally irradiate agencies to save the NHS millions if not billions. It is growing exponentially; we are expecting another three trusts to join it this month and now rather than trusts competing with each other, they are working together.
What would you like to achieve over the next 12 months?
I would love to see the collaborative bank growing nationally but I have a feeling that other collaborative banks will begin to form across the UK. We are also launching our AHP nursing products to cater for this workforce group because they are equally as important as doctors. We started with doctors because Nick and I are clinicians but we hope that the nurse bank will have equally success over the next 12 months.
Could you tell me about some of your learnings over the past few years?
There is no magic bullet to get innovation in the NHS; it is very much a people’s game.
We learnt that every trust is very different in its own right, but there are a lot of similarities that you have to empower trust by showing what each trust what their similarities to their neighbours are. I have been to so many talks in the NHS and have shamelessly used the same quote over and over again that the NHS ‘has more pilots than the RAF and the British Armed Forces combined’.
You really have to push for the similarities between trusts, show people why they are facing the same struggles, and what a trust has done down the road, maybe able to help. You just save so much time and energy sharing learnings which doesn’t always happen unfortunately.
What advice would you have given yourself three years ago?
I always wanted to be a doctor growing up, I loved the job and still do love the job. But, Nick and myself were extremely lucky, particularly with the timings of everything that happened, in that we both seized the chance to change something significant in the NHS before NHS Improvement had thought that agency spend was a problem that needed addressing. We were already there with our idea. I would have still done medicine despite the success of our innovative technology.
The advice I would give to myself is ‘you cannot expect life to move forward as you expect!’ – chances come up, opportunities come up and I would have told old me to take risks; the bigger the risk, the greater the reward. Embrace the challenges, embrace the tough days.
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