Blog

After 9 weeks of lockdown and working from home becoming the new norm for many, you may be finding it is getting harder to stay motivated and asking yourself when will it all end. For many it is a tricky and anxiety-inducing time – weeks of working in one place, with family to juggle can take its toll on anyone’s productivity and ...

Since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, general practice has been forced to change its daily routines and adjust to a new reality, with surgeries moving fast to online triage and consultations in a very short space of time. Leaders have had to make plans to ensure their staff are ready to play their part in the COVID-19 response. GPs ...

  It’s very difficult at the moment to think about anything other than the Covid-19 pandemic. It is presenting primary care with unforeseen challenges and there is a lot of trepidation around how it will cope under the strain. Although it is far too early to be thinking about absolute learning points from how we deal with it, it will ...

Free trial or no free trial? In the world of IT software it seems to have become the norm to offer potential customers a free trial. But, dare I say it, we don’t do this at RotaMaster and nor do we plan to. “WHAT?” I hear you gasp. It does often spark questions and confusion as to why. The reasons why are quite simple really and are ...

Practice managers – what does the future hold? Recent statistics from 2019 suggest that more than 25% of practice managers are actively planning to quit their jobs and many more feel unhappy in a role with increasing pressure and decreasing satisfaction. Burnout is often cited. Practice managers keep the doors open, the lights on, the ...

Winding down for Christmas? I’m not sure about that, but as the countdown to Christmas ticks down, I thought I’d take a moment to sit back and reflect on the business and the sectors we operate in. There has been a lot going on at RotaMaster HQ in the last few months against a backdrop of difficult and changing times in our key sectors of ...

  Over the last couple of months we have attended a number of healthcare events and conferences, including Management in Practice, Urgent Health, RCGP annual conference and one thing that has been quite striking is the number of people talking to us about their uncertainty over primary care networks (PCNs). In this blog we thought we’d look ...

We have been working with Nouvita now for around 3 years. We wanted to share their story, as it’s a great example of what a positive impact our systems can have on a business in helping them on the path to greater success. Nouvita’s predicament In 2016, when Nouvita first approached us, they had in place a cumbersome system of manual rota ...

Population health Improving population health has become an urgent priority. It’s not difficult to understand why when you consider that morbidity strikes 10-15 years earlier in some disadvantaged populations (David Buck, King’s Fund). We have got used to people living longer, that we have an ageing population, but in reality, in recent years, ...

You may be rather sceptical over the recent launch on 1st July of the government’s new digital transformation body. You might think “we’ve seen it all before” or “why will it be any different this time?” but maybe we need to have a bit of faith in what Matthew Gould is setting out to achieve. Isn’t it, after all, about time that the NHS gets their ...

With many people citing the workforce crisis in the NHS as the biggest threat to the success of the Long Term Plan (LTP), we look at the changes needed not only to workforce strategy but also how leadership and culture need to change if the LTP is to have the desired impact. An unhappy workforce The NHS has been suffering for years, as the ...

The NHS long-term plan, published in January this year promises a 3.4% real terms annual increase in the NHS budget up until 2024. As welcome as that may be, in order to meet the rising demand, the staff shortages present a crisis that may well put the success of the plan in doubt. Current scenario The reality is that 1 in 11 posts* in the ...