East Midlands Healthcare Workforce Deanery

The EWTD pilot project in Northampton involved collaboration between the east Midlands Healthcare Workforce Deanery and Northampton General Hospital NHS Trust. The initial aim of the pilot was to extend the Hospital at Night model to cover the weekend daytime periods. However, an audit of activity suggested that a single multidisciplinary team to cover the whole hospital at weekends would be impractical for providing the cover required for the complexity of weekend working. As a result of this it was apparent that a range of solutions would be required which reflected the different working arrangements and service needs across the hospital. Moreover, changes in weekend working patterns could not be achieved without impacting on weekday working patters.

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• Single Speciality – involving reconfiguration of teams from within individual departments.
• Cross Speciality – involving teams from different departments working together to provide services and sharing Out-of-Hours work.
• Cross County – involving exploring opportunities for pooling resources with nearby hospitals to provide specialist services on a county wide basis.

All the solutions sought to capitalise on multi-disciplinary and multi-professional working wherever possible to minimise the numbers of Doctors in Training required covering Out of Hours services and protecting day time training opportunities.