I have a confession. I built the first e-job planning solution, MyJobPlan (with a little help from the team at Zircadian Ltd). It launched in 2004 and was the first of a new generation of cloud-based digital tools to help hospitals manage the job planning process.
We sold MyJobPlan (as I suspect it still is today) on its benefits of being a paperless process, providing more control and less administrative burden. Don’t get me wrong, to see, at the touch of a button, your consultants are contracted to deliver 18.65 PAs of elective theatre sessions a week is a big improvement on weeks of wrangling paper job plans to arrive at the same answer the same answer. E-job planning provides real operational gains in improving the efficiency and transparency of the process.
But job planning was introduced to help organisations better match their consultant resource to demand. Yet job planning alone cannot do this. Even if a job plan is contextualised with organisational and department objectives it does not and cannot answer questions such as,
"If my consultants work 18.65 PAs, what will my PTL look like next year?"
or,
"How many PA’s do I need to reduce the back log to a sustainable number?"
These are strategic questions and they need to be answered first to provide goals for the e-job planning process. Once service planning has identified the target number of PAs, the job planning process works, in tandem, to agree these required PAs from individual consultants. Without effective service planning prior to the job planning process, e-job planning is rudderless and consultant activity is unlikely to be matched to patient demand. The reality is that there is very little planning in the current e-job planning process.
The question of “what resources do I need ” becomes ever more pertinent as post covid demand grows and realistic projections need to be made around capacity and performance. It is vital that evidence-based, data driven service plannning needs to be upfront and centre stage in the annual service planning cycle. Only once the servant of e-job planning is leashed to its service planning owner will value be realised from the significant investments currently being made in e-job planning.