For Clinicians
Case Studies
Kent and Medway ICS covers 188 GP practices, 41 PCNs and serves a population of 1.9 million. With the lowest GP-to-patient ratios in the country, and populations in coastal and rural areas, finding GPs and delivering services was often challenging. They relied heavily on locum GPs through agencies which was time-consuming, expensive, and still struggled to meet demand.
When the flexible staff pool funding was released at the end of 2020, they saw an opportunity to adopt a solution that would help them quickly engage more GPs to fill shifts. Lantum was chosen as the preferred provider and started working with Kent and Medway in April 2021.
Connecting organisations to staff
Kent and Medway ICS used Lantum to build a multi-disciplinary, flexible staff pool across their system so that all practices can quickly and easily access staff when they need them, at a lower cost than booking locums through agencies.
Today over 186 sites can choose from over 354 staff in the flexible staff pool, including salaried GPs and trusted, local locums to fill their shifts. Critically for the ICS, the staff pool is multi-disciplinary, enabling them to include clinical supervisors and other staff types beyond GPs to expand their capacity to see patients.
Alistair Lindsay, Associate Director, Primary Care Transformation, Development & Improvement, said: "Practices and locum staff find the platform easy to use, and it’s an effective way of matching our locums with 400-500 shifts per month.”
An end-to-end system
As well as helping practices to fill shifts, Lantum helps GP practices reduce admin and save time. The Lantum team supported them throughout clinician onboarding and vetted and checked all compliance documents, which are now stored on staff-profiles for easy reference.
Making staff and locum GPs happier
When surveyed, 94% of Kent and Medway staff said they would recommend the Lantum staff bank to their colleagues. They enjoy having access to reliable locum GPs with direct messaging in the platform for quicker response times. They also find it easier and quicker to post shifts compared to working with agencies.
On the other side, Locum GPs like that the platform manages invoicing and pension paperwork for them, and that it’s easy to find shifts and communicate with practices.
Alistair Lindsay said: “It’s all in one place, which is really key. What practices can do now is book shifts further in advance and make these available to a much wider pool of primary care staff than was previously possible. Locum staff can also benefit from new shift opportunities being sent out to them rather than having to search for available shifts.”
Looking ahead
To continue to address the problem of filling shifts in their rural communities, Kent and Medway ICS is piloting remote consultations with a remote clinical desktop solution. They’re hosting the remote shifts on Lantum, seamlessly integrating the local scheme into the wider organisation so their GPs can easily select between remote and in-person shifts – successfully empowering more flexible working, while reaching more patients.
When NHS England introduced additional funding for Enhanced Access in 2017, many GP practices in Wolverhampton were hesitant to participate due to concerns over the practicalities of managing staff, schedules and costs.
To overcome these challenges, 18 out of 45 practices in the region agreed to transfer the funding to a single organisation, Unity Primary Care, that would manage Enhanced Access on their behalf.
Led by Dr. Kam Ahmed, Unity Primary Care began delivering extended hours—6pm to 8pm on weekdays and 8am to 2pm on weekends.
The service, which included GPs, nurse practitioners, and clinical pharmacists, proved highly effective and soon gained buy-in from more GP practices in the area.
However, certain aspects of service delivery were inefficient, creating unnecessary administrative burdens and consuming time that could have been better spent elsewhere. As Dr Ahmed says:“ It was becoming an onerous task for the service manager to try and keep up on top of staffing with spreadsheets. I thought, there's got to be a more efficient way to do this.”
Lantum was selected as the workforce management solution that would meet their needs: ensuring seamless rota coordination, compliance tracking and payroll automation:
“ I thought Lantum was efficient and user friendly – getting all your shifts in one place.”
Reliably filled shifts
One key innovation Unity Primary Care adopted was in their staffing model. Instead of multiple GPs per shift, the service operates with a single GP, supported by a multi-disciplinary team, including nurse practitioners and clinical pharmacists.
By creating a flexible pool of staff on Lantum, the team have been able to ensure that shifts are consistently covered—even on bank holidays. For last-minute emergencies, the team can access Lantum’s GP Marketplace and book from a pool of 30,000 vetted locums.
In fact, since opening in 2017, Unity Primary Care has never faced workforce shortages and has maintained an almost unheard of track record of staying open every day of the year.
Successful service expansion
With Lantum providing operational efficiencies, the team’s time has been freed up and redirected to valuable areas like service improvements, patient engagement and the expansion of services.
The organisation has been able to introduce additional services, including a breast cancer contact service and audiology clinics, and respond rapidly to changing needs. When COVID-19 hit, the team were able to pivot and quickly set up a Covid Red Zone:
“Because we were already set up on Lantum, we had our data sharing agreements with practices already in place through our Enhanced Access. For us to turn around and set up a Red Zone service took less than 24 hours.”
Unity Primary Care is now using Lantum to deliver Enhanced Access for half of Wolverhampton, covering approximately 180,000 patients. The service continues to evolve and the team remains committed to innovation—ensuring out-of-hours care remains accessible, sustainable, and fit for the future.
“I don't think that it would have gone on this long if we didn't have Lantum in place. I've gone back and looked at the other systems we looked at way back in 2018 and I wouldn't swap, for love nor money.”
With disconnected systems and a lack of visibility around staffing, leaders in Dorset were struggling to efficiently deploy their workforce and plan ahead to deliver the services their patients need. They were also facing challenges with recruiting and retraining staff over a large rural area – exacerbated by the lack of flexible working due to technical and governance barriers to deploying staff across multiple organisations.
Our Dorset ICS partnered with Lantum to bring their entire workforce together on Lantum, using the flexible staff pool and rota to deploy staff more effectively and gain more visibility over how and where they’re working.
Making flexible working possible
We created a bespoke, digital passport that allows Our Dorset clinicians to work freely across 250+ organisations in the region. Passported staff are added to the flexible staff pool, which organisations can then draw from to fill shifts. Staff also have the flexibility to sign up for extra shifts at any of those organisations..
Today, over 1,000 staff in more than 27 roles are using the pool, transforming the way they work and helping make sure services are staffed effectively. This increase in flexible working is also supporting staff satisfaction, helping the ICB attract and retain their teams.
Powering real-time staffing insights
Using Lantum rota, organisations now have a single source of truth that’s always up to date. Rota managers can easily see where gaps are and fill them through the staff pool. Having one centralised rota system also increases alignment between individual practices and decision makers, and enables accurate insights around staff usage and shortages to inform planning and budgetary decisions.
90% shift fill rate in month one
Using their ICB-wide, multi-disciplinary flexible staff pool, over 250 organisations now share their workforce easily across different sites and employers. With efficient mobilisation, everyone can get the skills and people they need, where and when they need them.
Whatever comes next for Our Dorset, with Lantum in place, the ICB will be able to predict and meet the ever-evolving needs of the region, to maximise patient care and staff satisfaction.