Why collaboration is key

At RotaPal, we are passionate about collaboration and working directly with our beneficiaries, ensuring we're consistently innovating based on user needs. Mr Martin King, a General Surgery Registrar with NIMDTA, shares this vision for industry collaboration. In his own words, here's what Martin had to say on both collaboration and his teams implementation of RotaPal.

‍

"When we implemented RotaPal we started with the Pan specialty surgical rota, it was the most complex rota at the time. Amalgamating four specialty rotas set the bar high, but the doctors loved the move from excel to live online format.

The feedback for extremely positive, with better governance, and good capacity to accommodate requests, with time stamps to requests and transparency in terms of knowing when you could take leave in line with preset parameters through RotaPal.

Medicine heard the feedback that was shared by the surgical team and immediately wanted to use the app as well.

Being frank and open enabled a very fresh dynamic approach to the situation is how the relationship began. A key point was starting small and showcasing potential, which allowed the user to give feedback and tell their story.

It's important to recognise that RotaPal is an innovation in technology - it's grown from a clinical understanding of the issues that exist. Having the ability to quickly access who's on-call or make a request, has ensured there is now far greater accessibility and connectivity across the team each day.

Managing and accessing spreadsheet rotas is laborious and burdensome, we have struggled for years to adopt new technology that facilitates the needs of doctors and frontline staff. One benefit of the pandemic is that it highlighted these needs, and paved a way for change.

There needs to be more advocacy, there is great technology being developed on our doorstep and we need to be open to having these key collaborative conversations and ultimately making changes.

Feedback fuels development and the relationship between innovators and users is crucial for the benefit of not only the company but those in the environment, as each new version is released it's the clinicians that will benefit.

Clinical entrepreneurship should be brought to the forefront, where mutually beneficial relations will pave the way for fundamental change.

Having a conversation and collaborating is critical to solving a lot of our problems, as is clear in this case.

We, clinicians, can help, and tech should not be seen as scary."

‍

Mr. Martin King

SpR, General Surgery.
President of the Association of Surgeons in Training
‍

‍