Service-level planning: good for you, your teams, your pocket and your patients
In my role as Chief Medical Officer at the country’s leading supplier of clinical job planning, deployment and appraisal solutions, I have the privilege to talk not just to doctors and administrative teams, but to Executive and Non-Executive Directors, senior figures in the regulatory community and a whole host of other people connected to, and professionally invested in, safe and effective patient care.
As you might imagine, the ways in which we can bring teams together to harness the very best of their clinical capabilities whilst providing maximum financial and operational value is a prominent theme in those conversations. And service-level clinical job planning is a key element of how we do that.
The days of approaching a job plan as something akin to a tick-box, administrative exercise in form-filling are, thankfully, over. I bear the scars of that era as a jobbing clinician, and it delivered nothing of value. The proactive work done by the NHS England productivity team, led by Stella Vig, has delivered a refreshed ethos based on professional development, multidisciplinary working, identifying real value, and applying the principles of job planning in an elevated and more meaningful way. At RLDatix we have been a proud partner on that journey.
We are now at the next level. This is the time for service-level planning.
When teams plan together to care together, they work more effectively, more harmoniously and deliver better outcome metrics. They also cut costs without cutting safety or quality. It’s an exercise that goes beyond groups of doctors. This is about managers from the financial, operational and clinical functions working collaboratively to agree their activity and deliver it.
The core of that is, of course, data. High quality, reproducible and reliable data. At RLDatix we’re excited about the data analytics we now offer, and we continue to offer more of, to our job planning and deployment customers nationwide. Providing not only data, but analysis and intelligence to facilitate fast, accurate and meaningful demand and capacity planning across all those workforce groups involved in service delivery.
Armed with that data, we can make best use of the teams we have. Those involved in effective service level planning feel more involved, more empowered and more enthusiastic about the care they provide. Our feedback tells us that. It needs careful curation, development, sharing of best practice and collaboration. But the effort required pays dividends. The prize is happier, engaged staff, working to shared goals, in control of their own delivery and with enhanced accountability and governance. That’s something we can all get behind.
Through the course of 2026, we’ll be sharing some examples of where this already works well, some of the associated benefits to governance, risk and compliance that service level planning can yield, and encouraging all those who provide care in a service based approach to get involved in this elevated approach to how best to plan and deliver. For now – think about your data. Think about your planning processes; be open to change and improvement, and be open to support and sharing. We can take job planning to the next level. Our patients deserve nothing less.
