This article will summarise the core features of the Patchwork Bank solution and allow you to deep-dive into additional articles to understand better how and when to use them to help support fill rates
Staff Groups & Grades
Patchwork has been designed to work with predefined staff groups, such as Medics, Nursing, Healthcare assistants, Allied Health Professionals, Admin & Clerical and Estates & Facilities.
Each organisation can create grades linked to the above staff groups, completed during implementation.
Rates of pay are then configured at each unique grade type allowing for flexibility and visibility of pay throughout all stages of the product, The Hub, The App and Patchwork Insights for reporting.
Further configuration to determine pay rates can be set at the department level to either pay to the shift grade or to the worker grade. This ensures that the system will follow your individual organisation's needs.
Departments, Divisions and Specialties
Each department that is created within the Patchwork Hub has the following information attached to it.
- Department Name (Visible in worker app)
- Contact e-mail address (visible in worker app)
- Contact Number (visible in worker app)
- Site Name (which contains map URL configuration to support app shift search)
- Speciality (which supports app shift search)
- Division (which supports insights & scorecard reporting)
- Default cost centre (to support payroll)
- Any other associated cost centres (to support payroll)
Within each department, a number of configurations can be made which determine how the booking behaviours work within that department, these include the ability to;
- Allow grade booking up or booking bown
- Allow pay to shift grade or pay to worker grade
- Email notification sending
- App timesheet sign-off abilities
- Agency Kick out timeframes - When a bank worker can replace an agency worker via the app
- Mark urgent time frames - make shifts flag as urgent in the app
- Enhanced department - allows a separate set of default rates to be applied to shifts if the department is marked as enhanced, IE departments such as ED may offer a different rate of pay to other departments.
The configuration of each department can be completed by Hub Admins within your organisation, with the appropriate feature permissions.
If you are a hub user who wants to review your settings please contact your temp staffing team.
If you are a temp staffing team member who would like a full extract of current department settings, please reach out to your customer success manager or to help@patchwork.health
Creating Bank Shifts
Shifts can be created on a defined date with defined start and end times. The ability to define staff groups and grades also exists.
The default rate card for that grade will be applied to that shift based on the department settings defined above.
Once shifts are created they are published to the hub and made visible to workers in the Hub immediately.
It is also possible to create Sessional shifts, which instead of having a fixed hourly rate attributed to them, allows you to assign a set sessional rate of pay.
Assigning Instant bookers
Instant booking allows clinicians on a case-by-case, department-by-department basis to move from having to apply for a shift to being able to instantly book into a shift.
See the full article on the benefits and user cases of Instant booking here
Click here to see how to turn a worker into an instant booker
Block Bookings
Block bookings allow users to create a group of shifts under a single book, which advertises shifts as the full group, making applying and assigning workers to blocks of shifts quick and easy.
Rate Escalation
Patchwork has a fully configurable rate escalation tool which comes as standard, allowing organisations to customise controlled rate escalation pathways directly into the system. Based on user access and permission, users can either approve escalations themselves based on tiered permissions or request escalations through the tool.
Time Sheet sign off
All timesheet management can be completed from within the system and via the patchwork app, removing the need for paper timesheets to be completed.
Based on organisation configuration, departments can be set up to allow shifts to be signed off from the app, sent to a department approver, and if required can have a 2nd stage sign-off before transmitting shift and pay information to a pay file.
Because all rates are clearly displayed in the Patchwork Hub and the Patchwork app at every stage of the process, this should remove any speculation about what each worker will get paid for completing shifts.
Each department can be configured to pay the worker to the requested grade or to pay the worker to their actual grade, and this can also be applied when a worker is potentially booking up or down grades to cover unfilled shifts.
Within the Patchwork Hub & App, workers are able to see the value, status and audit trail of when their timesheet has been approved, signed off and paid minimising the need for additional questions or queries to be raised relating to payroll.
Agency Management
It is not always possible to fill every shift via a bank worker, although we hope that by using Patchwork well in your organisation and following the best proactive advice we can offer you can achieve high bank fill rates, it is sometimes necessary to send unfilled shifts to an agency.
Patchwork has two methods of recording agency shifts in the Hub
1. Via our simple agency manager - where temp staffing teams can record shifts as being sent to an agency and complete the sourcing and fulfilment outside of patchwork systems, but record the name of the worker against the shift once booked in.
2. Via our state-of-the-art agency management system, which is a bolt-on service that allows shifts to be directly broadcast to all your onboarded agencies, where they have a live feed of any shifts that have been sent to them, and they can propose workers (along with all relevant CVs, documentation and rates from within the platform)
Pay Per Item (coming soon)
With more complex and unique ways of paying staff becoming the norm, and supporting the backlog of waiting lists, Patchwork has developed a tool to allow workers to submit work they have completed where they can receive payments based on the volume of activity that has been completed, IE where a radiologist has reported on 10 additional images, or a nurse has seen 3 private patients.
- See the full article on our Pay Per Item feature here (Comming soon)❌
- Click here to see how to configure pay-per-item details (Comming soon)❌
- Click here to see how to add a pay-per-item shift (Comming soon)❌
On-Call Shift management (coming soon)
Managing Non-Resident on-call shifts in patchwork is currently completed through our session shift types, however, we have been working on a new feature to support the introduction of On-call shift types to be created, that calculates pay automatically based on hours available on-call and time called out. This sought-after feature will improve the admin time it takes to correctly calculate pay for workers and give even more data-rich reporting capabilities when it comes to callout demand on shifts
- See the full article on the on-call shift management feature here (Comming soon)❌
- Click here to see how to create an on-call shift (Comming soon)❌
- Click here to see how to add callouts to an on-call shift(Comming soon)❌