Rationales

For Estate Leads

Estates and Space Management leads here in the NHS tell us that a detailed view of occupancy data is vital to planning and management. You need to monitor demand, identifying hotspots and under-used areas. UBook includes a module specifically for this:

A live dashboard of current occupancy*, with drill-down view of active departments
A detailed Report Builder, tapping into all your booking data to view trends across any or all of your premises.

* or pick any previous date, week or month.

For example:

You’re preparing a business case to rationalise your footprint by closing down one location.

In UBook’s Report Builder you could extract the usage data for that location for the last 12 months, showing the low usage. You can include this as conclusive evidence in your business case.

You let your rooms out to neighbouring organisations on a paid basis.

Set the room’s hourly price in UBook and the system will produce a monthly (or any other frequency) report for your Finance team, showing them how much they have to invoice each client organisation.

You need to assure your statutory obligations in provisions such as first aid.

Let UBook show you how many people are typically on your site, clearly evidencing whether you need trained first aider (> 25 staff) or a first responder (< 25 staff).

Also add a check box on the booking form which staff have to tick to confirm they’ve completed mandatory fire safety or other training.

You believe there’s a problem with people booking rooms but not turning up and not cancelling them. While those rooms sit empty, others are struggling to find a meeting or clinical space.

With UBook’s Report Builder you can easily list which teams, or even which colleagues, are most prone to making bookings but not fulfilling them.

And if you use UBook’s feature to attach an hourly value to a room, you can report on the exact opportunity cost of the lost room time, e.g. DNAs in Team X equated to £1,200 last year.

This data greatly empowers any briefing you then make to staff to cancel unneeded bookings.

You need to monitor / evidence your compliance with the latest minimum square meterage rules and NHS staff to desk recommendations.

Use UBook’s report builder to show occupancy on any selection of dates. This gives you the proof that real-life space occupancy is compliant, to support your existing ratio calculations.

For End Users

UBook – Booking a room. That’s all it takes for a member of your organisation to book a hotdesk, room or parking space on UBook. They can even book all three at once, but that takes a few seconds longer!

This has been profiled as costing roughly a tenth of the staff time expended in contacting reception or the admin team and using spreadsheets and e-mails.

By being fully-usable on a smartphone, staff can make and manage their bookings while away from work. As soon as they know of a need for a clinical session or an on-site desk they can book it. That means no missing out on slots while away from base.

If you have several locations in your organisation, staff can look for a room or desk across all sites.

And if they want to sit next to someone in particular, it’s easy to find where that person is booked in and book the desk next to them.

Staff also have a ‘My Bookings’ feature, where they can view, amend or cancel any existing bookings.

If your organisation enables it, on UBook staff can also book catering when booking a room – all in the one transaction and with requests automatically sent to the relevant team.

For Clinical Use

Several Trusts use UBook to let approved staff groups book clinical rooms. Busy floor plans with rooms booked up are testament to the system’s effectiveness.

You can of course block book regular clinics in one go, e.g. the physio room every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon for the next three months can be booked in just a moment.

Some of our clients use UBook to manage a vast array of resources such as: waiting areas, training rooms, gymnasiums, theatres, dressings rooms, treatment rooms, audiology, ENT, orthoptics facilities, injection rooms and many other clinic rooms.

If you identify an advantage in UBook taking in data from your hospital EHR, we can do that too: setting up automatic data feeds via middleware called APIs.

Patient receiving treatment in a physio room

For the Organisation

You’ll save money:

We have calculations which show that somebody booking a room with UBook costs roughly one sixth of the staff time cost involved in booking via e-mail exchanges, spreadsheets and phone calls.

And as Estates leads tell us, UBook provides you with evidence for any rationalisation of your footprint and rental/lease overheads.

You’ll remove frustration:

Frustrating double-bookings, sit-ins an reliance on others to confirm bookings each become a thing of the past. And if you choose to switch on UBook’s check-in feature, if someone doesn’t arrive for their booking UBook will free the room or desk up back into the system so that someone else can book it.

You’ll leverage your existing IT:

UBook links directly to NHSMail, which means once your staff have signed in to your network (be that on-premise or working from home), they’re automatically logged in to UBook.

You’ll facilitate joint working:

UBook may well be unique in allowing other organisations, if you choose, to access your booking system in a controlled way. If staff from a neighbouring organisation work on your premises, we can link that organisation to your UBook too, so that both your and their staff can use it.

Also please remember, by deploying UBook you join the many other Trusts, ICBs and other NHS organisations who have embedded UBook as their space management system of choice. That weight of interest and influence in the product provides your organisation with the security of an established NHS product, as does its provenance, being supplied by MLCSU, an arms-length body of NHS England with over 2,000 staff and a £120m annual turnover.

Using UBook to transform room booking at Birmingham and
Solihull Mental Health Foundation Trust

Background

Before signing up to use UBook , Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Foundation Trust identified their room booking system as creating major time management issues.

Operating across several sites, the Trust had used several different methods of allocating desks and meeting rooms, including Outlook calendars, Excel spreadsheets and paper diaries. Staff often had to ring around several sites to find the size of meeting room they needed, and there was no audit trail, so if bookings were unexpectedly changed or rooms were double booked, there was no way to trace the source of the problem.

Action

Since piloting UBook in October 2020, the Trust now enjoys a centralised system which every member of staff across the Trust can access to determine the availability of all sizes of rooms across all sites to book the one closest to their needs. As well as meeting rooms, the Trust is using UBook for clinic room bookings, desk bookings and arranging meetings with approved visitors.

MLCSU has worked closely with the Trust’s Programme Management Office to adapt the system to local needs, and attends regular meetings to map out future enhancements, provide updates and seek feedback on changes made. These changes have included the swift introduction of new features to help the Trust coordinate onsite working during the COVID 19 pandemic.

Impact

UBook has had a major impact on improving the efficiency of
Trust systems. Teams sometimes book larger (or smaller) meeting or clinic rooms than they need, but UBook allows managers to review bookings and change bookings to ensure the most efficient use of available meeting room space is made. Ubook can also prompt a user that a better sized room is available before they commit to a booking.

Initially a desk booking system was introduced at the Trust HQ to support hot desking and reduce the need to provide allocated
desks. This was quickly adapted during the COVID 19 pandemic to ensure that desks could be removed to comply with social distancing regulations. UBook’s new interactive floor map showed staff which desks could be booked at any given time and the system locked out desks for 72 hours after each use to ensure that they were COVID free before being used again. Before the pandemic, the trust intended to install touch self check screens, but infection control measures made this inadvisable, so MLCSU quickly created a QR code ‘check in’ capturing when staff arrived.

The Trust operates three secure forensic units and all patient
visitors have to be approved by the clinical team before they visit using a cumbersome paper system. To resolve this, MLCSU worked with the Trust’s electronic patient record (EPR) team to integrate UBook with the Rio EPR, so that details of approved visitors are automatically imported into UBook.

“MLCSU have been exemplary in their commitment to making the system work for our needs. Their response time to queries is excellent and at no point have I had to chase any updates/actions. Hand on heart, I’ve not had any negative feedback about UBook. The admin staff find it extremely useful and easy to use and the ward staff are all positive too

I’ve learned so much from working with CSU and I’m extremely grateful, I couldnt’ recommend them highly enough. I think that UBook is phenomenal and will benefit any organisation that uses it.”

Amanda Tierney | Project Manager

Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Foundation Trust