Rostering Reimagined: The WDHS Optima Journey

Western District Health Service (WDHS)

Introduction

Western District Health Service (WDHS) implemented Optima and Loop to establish a single, standardised digital rostering system across acute, aged care, community health and corporate services. Go-live in October 2025 transitioned nearly 1,000 staff from fragmented manual processes to a live, organisation-wide workforce platform.

The initiative aimed to streamline roster creation, improve staffing visibility, enable flexible work practices and reduce administrative burden. Within three months, Optima became the central system for managing availability, leave, attendance and shift allocation across multiple campuses.

This whole-of-organisation change has strengthened transparency, communication and fairness in rostering practices. WDHS is now positioned to use workforce data and insights to better align staffing with service demand, support workforce sustainability and improve continuity of care across its rural health services.

Challenge

WDHS relied on decentralised and manual rostering practices across services. Units used paper, spreadsheets, whiteboards and phone calls, creating duplicated effort, inconsistent data and significant administrative burden. Rosters were often re-entered into payroll, and attendance exceptions required time-consuming reconciliation.

Filling vacant shifts was reactive and fragmented. Managers contacted staff individually, often without records, and multiple units approached the same employees. Casual staff had limited visibility of available shifts across the organisation, reducing workforce flexibility and fairness.

These limitations constrained managers’ ability to oversee staffing levels and respond proactively to service pressures. Despite years of seeking a solution, inefficiencies persisted across all divisions. WDHS required a unified digital rostering platform to improve visibility, reduce manual workload and support sustainable workforce management across its multi-site rural health network.

Approach

WDHS partnered with RLDatix to implement Optima and Loop through a structured, collaborative rollout. Initial workshops validated rostering practices and confirmed complex enterprise agreement rules across diverse workforce groups. Iterative build and testing ensured workflows aligned with operational needs.

A staged transition supported adoption. Roster managers received targeted training, and two parallel pay cycles were completed before full go-live. Loop was introduced progressively to enable staff self-service availability, shift visibility and communication.

The project was delivered by a multidisciplinary team of 12, including executive sponsors, payroll and finance leaders, improvement specialists and operational representatives from all divisions. Despite technical and access challenges, the team achieved a whole-of-organisation rollout across multiple campuses, establishing Optima as WDHS’s central workforce system and enabling scalability to new sites during merger expansion.

Achievements / Outcomes

Within three months of go-live, WDHS has realised measurable workforce and operational improvements. Managers now have real-time visibility of staffing levels and attendance, enabling faster gap identification and proactive resourcing during unplanned leave or service pressure. Payroll reconciliation effort has reduced significantly, freeing administrative time for workforce support.

Staff experience has improved through transparent shift allocation and digital availability management in Loop. Casual staff can access suitable shifts across services, and permanent staff report fewer out-of-hours contacts and better work-life balance.

Rosters now operate as a live organisational workforce dataset, supporting consistency across campuses and scalability to additional sites. As data quality strengthens, WDHS is positioned to use workforce insights to optimise staffing alignment, enhance continuity of care and improve service reliability across its rural health services.

Lessons for Others

• Engage frontline leaders early
• Validate EBAs before build
• Plan realistic rollout resourcing
• Use parallel pay cycles
• Phase staff self-service tools
• Align payroll and operations
• Expect early wins before maturity