SME of the Week: Patchwork

DigitalHealth.London’s SME of the Week is Patchwork, the tech-enabled bank service that’s transforming temporary staffing. Patchwork’s CEO and Co-founder, Dr Anas Nader talks about the company’s recent successes and what the future holds…

Patchwork is on a mission to unlock effective flexible working in healthcare to solve the staffing crisis. We’re proud to be transforming temporary staffing – empowering the workforce to deliver safe staffing in ways that work for them; giving them greater flexibility and control over how they work.

We’re a team made up of former healthcare workers and managers. And we know that neither a one-size-fits-all model – nor technology alone – will solve the complex demands of temporary staffing. So we work collaboratively with healthcare organisations to create bespoke solutions, made up of best-in-class technology and expert advisory service – all tailored to solve their unique challenges and goals.

There’s been a lot to live up to in 2020… 2019 at Patchwork saw our 10,000+ app users book over 1 million hours of bank shifts across our 16 partner trusts; averaging an 85% fill rate and replacing thousands of agency shifts. Luckily, it’s been a stellar start for 2020:

We kicked off the year with three exciting new trust partnerships. We were privileged to  partner with Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust, Warrington and Halton Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust – one of the UK’s largest Trusts where we’ll be offering greater flexibility to 12,000 staff members across their 50 departments and five sites.

We were also delighted to hear some truly kind words from our existing partner Trust, York Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. If you’ve a few minutes in your busy day, hear how Patchwork has transformed their staff bank and clinicians’ lives in the short video here: https://vimeo.com/393763776 

And the success continues with York as we were proud to pick up two awards with them. One Highly Commended at the HSJ Partnership Awards for ‘Workforce Innovation’, and one Health Tech News Award in the ‘Improving Efficiency for Back Office Teams’ category. Huge congratulations to everyone involved – we’re proud to work with such an excellent organisation and brilliant culture of quality improvement.

The first few months have also seen us make huge strides with the Patchwork offering to our healthcare workers. At this crucial time where clinicians deserve greater flexibility and control over their work and pay, we’ve teamed up with financial wellness company Wagestream to give our app users instant access to their wages – ahead of payday. Bringing greater empowerment to our NHS workforce, read about the recent announcement and why it’s so important here. 

Finally, we haven’t stopped at bringing empowerment solely to finances. We’ve brought empowerment to data too. We recently launched Patchwork Insights – the platform unlocking a wealth of real-time insights and intuitive reporting – helping Trusts get power over their data, meet targets, assess ward cover issues, manage actual and forecasted spend and much more.

It’s been a brilliant first few months at Patchwork, and our team of 40 are so hugely proud to call ourselves leaders in this flexible working transformation. Here’s to an exciting next decade, where we must continue working together to finally bring temporary staffing into the modern age; giving our workforce the opportunity to deliver the best care possible in a system that works for all.

Together, let’s transform flexible working in healthcare.