Rotamap

Case Study: Using data from Rotamap's systems to drive practical improvements at a board level

Francesca Smith, Rotamap - June 2026

Introduction

At Rotamap’s All Doctor Rostering Event in March 2026, Sara Smith, University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Trust (UHDB), presented on the rapid implementation of Rotamap’s services and the influence it had on the Trust’s access and use of medical workforce data.

As the Deputy Programme Manager of the Right People Programme, Sara oversaw the Trust’s successful and rapid rollout of Rotamap’s services which brought the immediate benefit of a single rostering platform across the medical workforce, improving visibility of medical activity across the Trust. This however introduced a new challenge of how to transform the growing dataset coming from this platform into meaningful operational intelligence.

Sara demonstrated the lessons learned in moving from implementation to data driven workforce improvements by developing a ‘benefits realisation dashboard’ as part of the wider Right People workforce transformation programme. While the dashboard itself did not directly drive change, meaningful improvements were realised through engagement by operational teams and board-level stakeholders, who used the insights to support workforce planning, service delivery, and strategic decision-making.

Starting point and new challenges

Prior to the implementation of Rotamap’s services, UHDB lacked a single source of truth for medical workforce activity. Different specialties had local rostering solutions and lack of consistency across the Trust resulted in the organisation struggling to answer basic operational questions over service delivery, additional sessions worked, and activity lost due to sickness and leave. The lack of visibility and less developed workforce intelligence for medical staffing compared to other staff groups made operational planning and financial oversight challenging.

Procurement of Rotamap’s All Doctor Rostering (ADR) for a single e-rostering solution for the entire medical workforce was driven by the need for improved visibility and the goals of the Right People Programme to:

• Improve workforce utilisation
• Improve visibility of medical activity
• Support operational planning and financial control
• Enable evidence-informed decisions

The rapid implementation of all medics on Rotamap’s software in under two years, took place against a background that had no agreed set of organisation-wide reporting KPIs. This meant as part of the implementation process there was limited time to establish a consistent strategy for system configuration and data usage. Increased visibility resulted in a new challenge of translating available data when organisational teams had not yet defined how they wanted to use the information for service planning or improvement, whilst board level executives expected measurable results to begin emerging.

Moving from KPI definitions to practical reporting categories

Sara explored how workforce intelligence had suggested using traditional workforce KPI reporting metrics to understand the medical workforce data obtained from Rotamap’s services. However, their designs based on the Agenda for Change workforce did not easily translate to the medical workforce; failing to capture variability in their working patterns such as:

• Annualised job plans
• Compressed PAs
• Variable clinical activity
• Non-clinical sessions and commitments
• Cross site working

Metrics such as workforce utilisation and availability percentages often proved misleading and the inconsistent rota configuration made it difficult to compare results across specialties without complex calculations. Recognising these limitations led to UHDB shifting focus to setting measures which were reliable, could be generated consistently and compared across specialties and most significantly; understood by non-specialists working at board level who were responsible for supporting practical workforce improvements.

Creating the benefits realisation dashboard

A core set of 25 KPIs were established following a review of the types of data obtainable from Rotamap’s service use at UHDB. The reporting model is intentionally simple in design, avoiding metrics which require manual manipulation and all measures based solely on data extractable directly from CLWRota and Medirota*.

By independently using Rotamap’s Report Builder in Central Reporting with the support of Rotamap’s help site documentation and training video; Sara created a report directly linked by Rotamap’s Central API to a PowerBI dashboard. The reporting focuses heavily on delivered sessions and other data points which are readily available and consistently recorded within Medirota and CLWRota to make the following overview categories:

• Activity delivered
• Availability or loss
• Workforce deployment
• Pressure indicators

*Services are only included in the reports powering the benefits realisation dashboard once they have demonstrated at least six months of consistent Medirota usage.

Using the benefits realisation dashboard to provide operational insight

The benefits realisation dashboard is used during quarterly meetings of the Right People Programme workforce transformation group supporting operational discussions, executive visibility, benefits realisation and identification of variation.

Example dashboard reporting usage case studies include the impact of the resident doctor industrial action and Derbyshire Country Council school holiday periods on workforce, offering lessons learned to be integrated into future workforce management planning.

Resident doctor industrial action

Comparing the November 2025 and December 2025 strike periods by reporting on Medirota data on delivered work and how it was delivered allowed realisation of the following insights:

• Increase in additional sessions and locum use
• Reduced weekday activity delivery, specifically seeing an increase in cancellations of elective work; but limited impact to weekend
• Increase in staffing pressures due to higher demands for consultant cover
• The return to normal levels following strike periods highlights how strike impact is immediate and short term

School holiday periods

Comparing the October 2025 half term and December 2025 Christmas breaks data recorded in Medirota highlighted:

• Planned leave spikes as expected but no rise in other unplanned absence types
• Peaks in planned leave correspond with reduction in weekday activity, daily staging levels and elective delivery

Conclusion

Using Rotamap’s rostering platforms in collaboration with our reporting tools informed UHDBs development of a formal PowerBI dashboard used at board level which supported the Trust’s move towards workforce decisions being supported by data. The consistent reporting KPIs and repeatability factors have brought the additional benefit of easy identification of where roster use, or compliance need improvement at a local service level, empowering workforce improvement teams to lead data driven initiatives for improvements.

Several key lessons emerged from the development of the dashboard: the most significant being the importance of raising board level awareness that implementation of rostering solutions and increased visibility of medical workforce work delivered and access to data does not directly translate into improvements. Meaningful change comes from translating the data available in Rotamap’s services into understandable insights. The dashboard alone did not create change but rather sustainable improvements depend on operational teams taking ownership of information and acting appropriately on insights gained.