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Introduction to Florence
Florence provides temporary staffing in healthcare settings. Their product connects care professionals to healthcare shifts instead of using traditional call centre agencies who are expensive and inefficient.
My role in this project
I planned and conducted the user research for this project, then collaborated with the team to ideate and create the best solution.
The problem
- Most healthcare facilities in Canada are unionised. A Collective Bargaining Agreement is in place between the care location and the staff that work there, this governs the order that shifts can be ‘awarded' to staff.
- We had little research and information to make an informed decision on the direction and requirements needed to solve the following:
Discovery and understanding
We started with some requirements that the manager in Canada had managed to obtain. This had some useful information, but we didn’t know what was missing or what was assumptions.
We knew that some of the information the Canada manager had provided was based on their own assumptions. It was important to challenge this and learn for ourselves what was in a collective bargaining agreement.
Explore
Ideally I would have began with the user research, but in this case we had visits booked with the care locations in Canada later in the month.
By this stage I had several examples of the bargaining agreements. This was plenty to identify the kinds of rules in place to protect healthcare professionals and also inform how the shift ‘awarding’ process looks internally from the care location.
Interview
We were already providing temporary staff to a small number of care locations, it was vital to talk to these and learn about the union rules, their current process for posting shifts and how the system generally differed from the UK.
Review
It was important to think about the end-to-end interactions with this feature, designing for a complete service not just an isolated screen or two. We’d have care professionals, care organisations, Florence admins, operations and more interacting with this new functionality.
Our PM, Tech Lead and myself assessed the research and project requirements with some wireframe ideation. With an objective being to deliver fast, we were particularly critical of technically challenging areas, completely new functionality and ‘nice-to-haves’.
How we solved the problem
We knew that whilst we had the user research, our main way to learn was getting the feature in the hands of the schedulers.
Here are few extracts from the final experience we agreed on for the first iteration. This focused on providing the critical parts of functionality with minimal new concepts/features added to the product.
Did it work?
In the month following release, there was a 280% increase in shifts filled by permanent staff now that we’d ensured we complied with the strict union rules. With us back in the UK, the team in Canada did a fantastic job of visiting the care locations and walking them through the new way of posting shifts.
Here is some rewarding feedback we got soon after from one of the schedulers - We’d observed this person buried in sheets of paper trying to manage the call out process - fortunately we could put and end to those days
“Florence has been an exceptional staffing partner… Their SMS Shift Call Out System has made notifying our healthcare staff about shift changes, emergencies, or last-minute replacements a breeze… The intuitive interface is easy to navigate, even for our non-tech savvy team members. Setting up the call out lists and managing our contacts takes minutes, saving our team time. Florence has reduced our reliance on outdated communication methods and paper-based call-out systems, resulting in cost savings for our care home. ”
— Director of Care at a care location in Canada