Southern Cross Healthcare operates a nationwide network of wholly owned and partnership hospitals, specialist centres, diagnostic services and community - based healthcare providers, with a focus on enabling better health for more New Zealanders.
Challenges
As a contemporary healthcare provider, Southern Cross Healthcare is continuously looking for ways to enhance and support the health and wellbeing of New Zealanders by investing in revolutionary healthcare facilities, workforce development, and technology.
The initial lack of modern technology in Southern Cross Healthcare’s administrative processes led to inefficiencies. Some issues that were identified included:
- Legacy workforce systems that were adding administrative burdens, taking time away from care
- Diverse people systems across the hospital network, creating challenges in cross-location collaboration
- Decentralised reporting and data visibility, making decision making more complex
- A need for improved processes to be more efficient in handling mandatory COVID regulations
Solutions
Eager to harness the power of digital to support operational excellence, and as a legacy UKG partner, Southern Cross Healthcare migrated from UKG Workforce Central to UKG Pro Workforce Management.
From the start, change management was crucial from top-down. Involvement from clinical teams, nursing staff, and executives ensured the best change approach was developed. Considerable amounts of pre-work went into understanding the change readiness of each hospital and the challenges for each that needed to be addressed for a successful roll out. A network-wide tactical plan was then developed, ensuring no one was left behind in adopting a new solution.
Through comprehensive collaboration, the UKG for Healthcare team with Southern Cross Healthcare, selected the right UKG Pro Workforce Management configurations for success. The organisation was also able to quickly implement a HCM system to streamline compliance and utilise real-time attestation procedures for contact tracing.
The UKG workforce management solution is currently used by over 2,600 employees, across more than 10 hospitals and six joint healthcare venture partnerships.
“I am proud of how our people across the organisation came together to implement this change during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. UKG Pro Workforce Management has provided immediate benefits, as well as provided the platform for further improvements to come.”
Hospitals & Corporate Portfolio Lead, Digital Services
Results
For Southern Cross Healthcare, people are the most important asset. With phase one of their UKG Pro Workforce Management rollout completed, Southern Cross Healthcare now has:
- Improved ways of communicating and connecting across departments and staff levels to elevate the employee experience
- An overall simplified system: staff can easily manage time and attendance and update compliance status via self-service
- Launched a pilot program for UKG’s scheduling solution with a phase two roll out planned across all locations
- Setup a partnered workforce optimisation program to work towards managing workload based on patient acuity along with exploring other automation opportunities
- Begun mapping out a HRIS strategic road map
