Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (OUH), one of the largest NHS teaching trusts in the UK, has a national and international reputation for its services and role in teaching and research.

With its recruitment, junior doctor training rosters and related HR and IT queries managed by several people across the Trust, OUH collaborated with NHS SBS’s automation experts on a solution to streamline processes, reduce the manual admin burden, enhance efficiency, and save staff time.

  • 15 minutes’ time saved per conditional offer letter per candidate
  • 45 minutes saved per unconditional offer per candidate
  • Time spent on processing conditional and unconditional offers has reduced from 20 minutes per case to 6.7, saving over 90 days per year
  • Robot “Lizzie” now assigns new junior doctor rotas and generates sign-ins for new starters resulting in a 50% decrease in time spent on the process
  • Compliments of Lizzie, the time spent on each schedule has reduced from 5 minutes to just 1.7 minutes
  • £53k savings realised in one year, projected to reach £500k in five years
  • 12 month payback period
  • 153% return on investment in year 1 reaching 245% in year 5
Oxford University Hospitals (OUH) Logo

“The NHS SBS team offers expert advice and proactive support, making them a joy to collaborate with. Their energy and commitment enhance our meetings, as they excel at simplifying processes. Their dedication has been crucial to our achievements”

Laura Bick, Assistant Director of Workforce,
Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

The Challenge

A world renowned centre of clinical excellence, OUH is made up of four hospitals – John Radcliffe Hospital, Churchill Hospital, Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre and Horton General Hospital.

It has 14,500 staff spread across its hospitals, and 59 satellite centres located in Oxfordshire and neighbouring counties.

There are 300 different job roles – from brain surgeons to tree surgeons and everything in- between.

The Trust receives hundreds of applications a month and has between 60 to 80 new starters every week.

This extends to junior doctors who join to train after completing medical school and undertake work shadowing.

New recruits rotate among hospital departments to learn all aspects of their role.

Consequently, it collaborated with NHS SBS on a solution to streamline and power up the process of recruitment, rosters and resource.

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The Solution

NHS SBS worked with OUH’s recruitment team to introduce automation across:

  • Unconditional job offers
  • Conditional job offers
  • “Welcome to OUH” candidate messages

NHS SBS designed a recruitment robot to replace the time-consuming human recruitment admin processes, which previously involved taking hundreds of pieces of data from multiple systems and sending several emails.

The robot makes conditional job offers to doctors, nurses and porters using Trac, which powers the recruitment for a large proportion of the UK’s public sector workforce, the NHS Jobs website and the Electronic Staff Record platform.

Additionally, NHS SBS developed another robot, ‘Lizzie’ who uses the Doctors Rostering System to automatically assign rotas to junior doctors, saving hours of time.

Prior to Lizzie’s ‘arrival’, the resourcing team had to manually process 500 individual schedules multiple times each year, as junior doctors are required to train across different specialities. Consequently, the time spent on each schedule has reduced dramatically.

So successful has the overall experience and benefits of automation to OUH been, it has a further seven robots in the pipeline.

The Result

Automation has created more efficient ways of working, leading to a better experience for both new starters and for the Trust’s resourcing team. It has taken on the bulk of tedious, time-consuming tasks, allowing staff to focus on better serving patients, whilst the streamlined processes are helping reduce the advert to induction timeline of 46 days.

Benefits realised across automation of recruitment processes and junior doctors’ rotas are significant:

  • 15 minutes saved per conditional offer letter per candidate
  • 45 minutes saved per unconditional offer per candidate
  • Time spent on processing conditional and unconditional offers has reduced from 20 minutes per case to 6.7, saving over 90 days per year
  • Robot Lizzie now assigns new junior doctor rotas and generates sign-ins for new starters resulting in a 50% decrease in time spent on the process
  • Compliments of Lizzie, the time spent on each schedule has reduced from 5 minutes to just 1.7 minutes
  • £53k savings realised in one year, projected to reach £500k in five years
  • 12 month payback period
  • 153% return on investment in year 1 reaching 245% in year 5
Oxford University Hospitals (OUH) Logo

“Lean on your provider. NHS SBS have been great.

Laura Bick, Assistant Director of Workforce
Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

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Robotic Process Automation

In 2018 we deployed our first robot and we now have an optimised digital workforce of over 80 robots. Each one is capable of carrying out multiple processes and, together, we estimate they’ve saved in excess of 450,000 processing hours (and counting) – including staff time that can be diverted to dealing with more complex financial matters and carrying out more analytical work including;

  • Robotic process automation (RPA) and intelligent automation (IA)
  • Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)
  • Process and task mining
  • Chat bots
  • Reporting and data analytics
  • Software licences for all major suppliers
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