At ESRconnect, working collaboratively with our users is one of the cornerstones of our approach to software design. Since the very beginning, we have been listening to and working with our client Trusts to design and add new features, and to ensure that our software meets their needs as closely as possible.

This approach has obviously had a huge impact on the functionality available within our core software products, but what you might not know is that we are often asked to get involved in other areas where things are proving difficult, or taking longer than they should, and our recent work on streamlining the Staff Lottery at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust is a great example of this.

“instead of days of work, it now takes less than 15 minutes each month…”

When Peter Wellock from Leeds contacted us we were only too pleased to help out, and who better to tell the story than Peter himself?…

Peter Wellock, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust

“It was a cold wintery morning when I was summoned to the first floor. Was it to be the dreaded words “Can you organise the Christmas Party Pete?” No, it was worse than that!

It was “Pete, the staff lottery software needs upgrading and moving into Payroll please….”

With a smile I took on the job and gave the expected assurance it would be done but who was I going to call? Ghostbusters? No, better than that, I needed the boffins at ESRconnect!

I already knew the payroll system held all the raw data for staff paying into the lottery and I also knew that with Paul and Shaun’s help we could work collaboratively on a new staff lottery module in ESRconnect. We needed something that would cut down on the manual work required to keep all the data up to date and verified each month, and make the whole process seamless.

With one call to ESRconnect we had a meeting arranged for the following week with their Technical Director, Paul Reade, to explore the possibilities. We met once and formulated a working plan which Paul took away along with our anonymised test data, to work on a prototype. Once that was complete we tested it and passed the tweaks back to Paul for fixing and within a month we had a new module built and ready to go.

Our Trust has now been using this module for 5 months and it is delivering an easy to use, reliable, secure lottery for our staff. It has cut down most of the manual checks that our Charitable Foundation staff used to carry out before Payroll took over responsibility, and instead of days of work, it now takes less than 15 minutes each month to run the draw. We even built in flexibility to adjust prizes, the number of winners and the number of draws we do each month.

I really believe this is a brilliant example of how well the NHS can work smart with the help and collaboration of the right external partners.”

If you’d like to learn more about the Staff Lottery Module, or have any other areas of your work which you feel could be streamlined then don’t hesitate to get in touch for an informal chat about the possibilities. It may be something we can include at no extra cost for new and existing users, and even if you don’t use ESRconnect yet, we think you’ll be delighted with our work and our NHS-friendly rates.