It was lovely to meet so many colleagues at the NEQAS/BBTS meeting last week.
As mentioned, I have attached a simple draft template that could be used to format your capacity plans, you just need to make sure you have the evidence to support your staffing requirements. Your own plans can then be made as detailed as required. The main thing is to identify what staff you need (realistically!), to keep your BB running with all activities including QMS, so take a look at your weekly staff rotas and identify the gaps eg Senior supervisor, serology bench bms, mla etc
I would really appreciate some feedback and ideas to improve this form together on this forum so we can add to the UKTLC Standards (2014) which are being reviewed and we hope to update you with these changes at the July 2018 SHOT meeting.
There will also be a link via the SHOT website later this week with some other documents.
Many thanks!
Rashmi
Last edited by Rashmi; 4th Dec 2017 at 03:25 PM.
Reason: update
As promised, the capacity plan can also be downloaded via the following link to SHOT ; https://www.shotuk.org/resources/current-resources/ These are situated at the bottom of the page with the other UKTLC resources.
At our local Transfusion Managers meeting the topic of Capacity Planning came up. This was highlighted from a recent MHRA inspection and appeared that most around the table had not produced an active plan. As resources are continually being stretched we should ensure that all hospitals are aware that a plan needs to be in place. Rashmi has a simple plan that can be followed but we need to spread the word.
Nice to have the Forum back again after the spammer hijacking - though quite amusing! Anyway, many thanks to all for promoting the simple capacity plan, I hope it helps and we can share some feedback on how to develop it further. When I update my current plan I will post a revised version- perhaps others could also share ? (please remove any identifiers). I now review my staff status monthly rather than quarterly as it is easier to do and more timely intervention can be taken.
Mike Dawe visited my lab last week and we had a good chat about how the plan needs to show the impact on team members. For example, if the BBM and 2 of 3 seniors are off-then there will be increased pressure on the remaining senior and staff. If anyone has ideas on how to visualise this please let me know ( no emojis allowed , though James Reason's Three Brown Bucket model might work ). Mike also mentioned that we should indicate the number of extra hours worked ( paid and unpaid) by individuals- so separate lines added to show this info.
Finally, I believe Mike mentioned something about running workshops around this topic- so something to think about with your TADG / RTC groups?
I have attached an excel sheet for monitoring staff, extra hrs, communication- and included some metrics: blood wastage, documents/ training out of review,delayed CAPA. These could easily be populated and submitted in your monthly or quarterly quality reports. At least this way there would hopefully be some senior management oversight of issues. Any comments gratefully received, i'm trying to improve my lab too and it's always good to share ideas.
bw
Your doc looks good Rashmi, I would link to include the items that regularly come up on the BCR form and include mandatory training such as GMP as well as a separate item. I would include all incidents as it is often the small things that are indicative or issue in a lab especially of you have good staff as they usually manage to avoid the major issues due to their ability. Do you monitor keeping up with audit schedules etc? The things that fall by the Road first are often the non critical bench duties.
Our process requires us to prospectively review so basically every 14 weeks at the rota meeting we bring audit calendars, staff rotas, changes planned, sop reviews coming up and build and move staff around the dept to achieve it. If we can’t we raise an incident and notify executive management. Our change control sop requires capacity plan review as part of the early stages of change planning. We also floor walk everyday and adjust staff if there is sickness and benches need covering. We raise an incident at this stage even if we resolve it. Then we trend these incidents and escalate so we have a more real time feel for what is happening.