Locum’s Nest is an innovative platform connecting NHS professionals with vacant shifts, optimising the financial and resource burden of temporary staffing and enhancing healthcare delivery.
The Locum’s Nest platform has saved the NHS £750 million, since its launch in 2015.
The flagship product, Locum’s Nest Match, connects 60,000+ healthcare professionals to vacant work in 50 NHS Trusts and hundreds of GP practices, supporting the delivery of effective patient care and reduction in waiting lists.
The Locum Nest platform has been spotlighted by The Telegraph as 1 of the “Top 5 ideas to save the NHS” and was awarded “Best Acute Sector Partnership with NHS” at the HSJ awards 2023.
Dr Ahmed Shahrabani, doctor and co-founder of Locum’s Nest, joined the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme in 2024, as part of Cohort 8.
Locum’s Nest, founded in 2015, is a technology company that provides a comprehensive workforce solution designed to connect healthcare professionals with temporary work opportunities within the NHS. The platform is helping NHS organisations improve workforce engagement and achieve significant cost savings by reducing reliance on agency staff when filling locum shifts.
In 2014, Dr Shahrabani’s studied medicine at The University of Sheffield. His professional path then led him to South London, where he embarked on his foundation training at Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals. It was during this formative period that he met Dr Nick Andreou, a fellow Foundation Year 1 doctor. The two quickly became friends, bonding over their shared experiences and challenges on the wards.
Throughout their weekly shifts, Dr Shahrabani and Dr Andreou noticed a recurring problem: the constant need for staff to work additional hours and cover shifts. They were frequently inundated with phone calls, emails, texts, and bleeps, asking them to work extra hours, which wasn’t always possible and with full-time staff often unable to fill all the gaps, the rota coordinator had to rely on agency and bank staff. This approach not only proved costly for the hospital but also highlighted a significant inefficiency in the staffing process. Concerned by these frequent challenges and high cost to the NHS, together they began to ponder a better solution.
Driven by their desire to improve staffing, Dr Shahrabani and Dr Andreou dedicated a year to understanding the problem in depth. They immersed themselves in frontline work, exploring the actual needs and envisioning what an effective solution would entail. This period of exploration and their firsthand experiences laid the groundwork for their innovation, and the basis of Locum’s Nest was born.
“The concept of Locum’s Nest came from our determination and conviction to solve the staffing puzzle for professionals and organisations alike. As Junior Doctors, we experienced first-hand how hospitals and practices had to dedicate so much time in arranging cover to resource patient care, and not forgetting the drain it proved on precious, limited finances.” said Dr Ahmed Shahrabani and Dr Nick Andreou.
Inspired by the success of companies like Uber, which leveraged on-demand technology to support the population, Dr Shahrabani and Dr Andreou sought to apply modern and successful business models to enhance processes within the NHS. They then began exploring how they could build a team, and secure funding to scale.
Through working additional shifts themselves and raising a modest family & friends investment round, they raised funds to create a minimal viable product. This resulted in a free-to-use mobile application for doctors, designed to facilitate cross-trust collaboration. Doctors could enter their information, including specialty and credentials, which would link to calendars and rosters. Only shifts that matched the clinician’s preferences, would the clinician be notified, thus avoiding a bombardment of notifications.
They approached several trusts and initially faced resistance. However, a comprehensive cost-saving analysis report, which projected savings of £1 million due to the app, along with evidence of improved patient experience and care, led to their first trial at the Royal Surrey in 2016
To begin with the app supported a single department with one grade of doctor, but it quickly expanded to support the entire department across all grades of doctors. It then extended its reach to ENT, surgery, anaesthetics, and eventually the whole trust.
“During our first pilot in an NHS trust we saved them £1.6million in the first year!”- Dr Ahmed Shahrabani
The success of this launch spread to the neighbouring trust, St Peter’s, and several other hospitals in the region, all of which expressed interest in exploring the app.
Locum’s Nest’s vision is to increase transparency, collaboration, and improve care outcomes within the health service.
In 2020, as the pandemic unfolded, Dr Shahrabani returned to clinical practice to support the crisis, taking on a part-time role as a senior house officer (SHO) in the acute medicine and respiratory wards. During this period, Locum’s Nest continued to advance, securing a venture capital round led by Albion Capital, which provided the momentum for further scaling of their innovation. This support enabled the application to evolve from solely a shift-matching platform to a comprehensive solution that supports the NHS in working more transparently and engaging their workforce through digital shift-matching, staff recruitment, communication, data visualisation, and interoperability. The mobile and web multi-product platform could then be used by healthcare professionals and NHS management teams, offering an array of workforce solutions that enhance the overall efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare delivery, including:
- Match: A solution which digitalises the entire shift booking process for bank and agency staff, resulting in substantial time, resource, and cost savings for the NHS. Match also includes digital timesheets that adhere to NHS governance standards.
- Community: A platform designed to bridge the communication gap and foster meaningful relationships between employers and their staff. It measures engagement with insightful metrics and offers a range of features, such as broadcasting critical alerts, involving staff in decisions, celebrating staff excellence, advertising full-time roles, and sharing staff wellbeing resources.
- PassportPlus: The comprehensive compliance and recruitment solution streamlines staff bank management, reducing the demand on capacity within the NHS. This had resulted in a 500% increase in the size of the staff bank for organisations and a saving of 4.5 days per month on repetitive admin tasks.
- Intelligence: An analytics platform that leverages the power of data to transform workforce management. Intelligence streamlines workforce analytics and maximises cost savings to services by providing executive reports, financial trends, forecast shift demand, and compliance, resulting in a 95% decrease in unnecessary shift requests.
- Link: A product that simplifies a trust’s integration with third-party providers, including all e-rostering, payroll, and vendor-management software. Link offers a powerful bi-directional integration with Electronic Staff Records (ESR.), facilitating the ease of mobility for NHS staff to cover shifts in different hospitals and healthcare settings.
- Collaborative Banks: This platform allows an organisation to connect to one or more collaborative banks, instantly growing their pool of contingent workers.
“I am really proud of the progress we have made and that we are now available to all healthcare professionals across the UK. I really enjoy the community feature as it fosters collaboration between the NHS communities, which ultimately leads to better patient care and workforce satisfaction.”- Dr Ahmed Shahrabani
To date, Locum’s Nest has achieved a saving to the NHS of £750 million so far. The platform has registered over 60,000 professionals to support shifts, delivered over 25 million hours of patient care, and established collaborative partnerships with over 50 NHS trusts. The platform has scaled and now available to all healthcare workers within the NHS and is utilised by one in two doctors across the UK, with a 97% fill rate for all vacant shifts.
In 2023, Dr Shahrabani applied for cohort 8 of the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme. Even though his innovation was late stage, he understood the value that NHS CEP network of over 1600 entrepreneurs, partners and mentors could provide; in addition to system introductions and opportunities
“If you are an innovator at any stage, you will benefit from this programme”- Dr Ahmed Shahrabani.
Ahmed found the community of fellow NHS innovators to be “a breath of fresh air.” The exchange of stories and the vibrant energy of those in the early stages of their careers reminded him of his own beginnings, filling him with new inspiration. Immersing himself in the network, he discovered a wealth of opportunities and connected with a mentor who has been supporting him through the next phases of his personal and innovative development.
“My biggest highlight about the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme, so far, is the networking with a like-minded community of other innovators. It’s great to be involved with idea sharing, collaborative opportunities, and we support each other with our different experiences and perspectives.
In this environment, you never stop learning, no matter how mature your innovation is. The NHS is so dynamic in terms of policy changes, direction of travel, and new governments coming in, so it’s great to be at the centre of knowledge during these times.
Access to mentoring is very special; it’s an opportunity to meet industry-leading individuals who all want to help you and give you their time. My mentor, Martin Gossling, has an impressive background in healthcare, the private sector, and still works within the NHS in some capacity, so he is able to support me around our business with NHS insight. I speak things through with him; he acts like a sounding board, and I get the honest business feedback I need to push forward effectively.
As someone who’s worked with over 60 trusts, you know a lot about the system, but I don’t know everything. It’s refreshing to hear someone else’s perspectives and knowledge, new approaches, and different ideas on what we should be doing to make an even bigger impact.
I look forward to continuing my journey on the programme and what’s to come. I would tell all healthcare innovators that it’s a competitive application process, but it’s totally worth it. It’s by far the best-structured programme I have been on so far in my career, and I’ve gotten so much out of it. It’s a great investment of time and energy, and you get the return on investment of both of those fairly quickly. I wish I had enrolled back in 2016, as I believe it would have helped me to progress even quicker.”- Dr Ahmed Shahrabani
Locum’s Nest is dedicated to reducing NHS waiting lists by expanding its clinical community and fostering collaboration between trusts through continuous learning, development, and innovation. The platform aims to do this through maximising the use of collaborative staff banks, which is essential for addressing waiting lists.
Currently, the team is working with several collaboratives, including NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Partners, Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust (MSE), to enhance clinical care for patients and improve cooperation between NHS sites.
A significant aspect of this initiative is the use of their AI tool, Shift Popularity Index (SPI). This technology enables clinics and services to anticipate the likelihood of shifts being filled at the point of advertisement, which supports the management of services and enables the scheduling of more patients in advance, thus tackling waiting lists more effectively. The more data that is received by the model, the more accurate it gets over time, and has been predicted to prove a cost saving of £175,000 per trust every three months, by having superior decision-making capabilities when compared to humans.
“If you’re interested in learning more about Locum’s Nest or exploring collaboration opportunities, please get in touch.”
For more information, on Locums Nest connect with the team through their social media channels:
References:
- https://www.gov.uk/government/news/secretary-of-state-pledges-to-contain-nhs-agency-spend
- https://locumsnest.co.uk/ncl-medical-collaborative-bank#:~:text=Locum%27s%20Nest%2C%20the%20workforce%20technology,and%20hundreds%20of%20GP%20practices.
- https://digitalhealth.london/innovation-directory/profile/locums-nest
- https://htn.co.uk/2020/01/15/interview-series-ahmed-shahrabani-co-founder-locums-nest/
- https://locumsnest.co.uk/
- https://www.hsj.co.uk/technology-and-innovation/ai-model-outperforms-human-decision-making-on-rate-escalations-fills-more-shifts-and-saves-trusts-thousands/7035483.article
- https://static1.squarespace.com/static/6409bab361096d0131b79e93/t/64997155297cff6342aa62b4/1687777623086/MSE+Case+Study+%282022%29.pdf