Jason Sawtell (West Moreton Hospital and Health Service)
Consulting firm Barhead Solutions has streamlined South East Queensland-based West Moreton Hospital and Health Service’s staff conversion system used to turn temporary and casual staff into full-time employees.
Offering health and wellbeing services to over 320,000 people across the Somerset, Scenic Rim, Lockyer Valley and Ipswich areas, West Moreton provides preventative and primary healthcare services, ambulatory services, acute care, sub-acute care, oral health and mental health services, to name a few.
Powered by the Microsoft Power Platform, the new app automates manual processes that were previously handled by human resources, according to West Moreton HR business partner Nina Watson. Emails are sent to line managers with a link to necessary documents, as opposed to HR sending individual emails.
Additionally, the West Moreton team can track the status of staff conversion requests and see how long a request has been taking. Requests that take more than a week will cause the app to send reminder emails every seven days, with an escalation email sent after 28 days.
Reports about the staff conversion process can be generated by the data analytics tool Power BI about the number of temporary workers up for review, currently in review and potentially overdue.
“Previously, the HR team would need to directly contact a line manager to escalate a request that will be soon overdue. With the app in place, there’s no need to anymore — the automated workflow takes over for us,” said Watson.
The previous Vader system was time and labour-intensive, Barhead claimed, with the HR team scanning and signing documents and sending at least 50 staff conversion requests daily, with three different screens needing to be checked for duplicate records.
As a result of the new system, Barhead claims the staff conversion app saves two to three hours per individual staff member, reducing the time spent on administration by the HR team.
“The new normal is busy and we need to ensure that all our workers — from frontline workers to support staff — are best supported by removing administrative burdens and releasing time to care for our patients and community,” said Jason Sawtell, chief digital officer at West Moreton.
Additionally, as the West Moreton workforce grows, with it expected to double in the next five to 10 years, the time savings are expected to grow with it.
“Once the app and system are in place, it won’t matter if we’ll have 10,000 employees — all of the heavy lifting will be done by the system,” Watson added.
In March, Barhead Solutions launched a Microsoft-powered software solution for not-for-profit (NFP) businesses, claiming to be the culmination of “decades of work”.
