Health Services
NHS Lanarkshire
Transforming how information is delivered to clinical staff.
From hours to minutes
Vable reduced the bulletin production process that took hours into just minutes. This allowed the team to deliver more frequent updates to clinicians, reallocate staff time to higher-priority tasks, and increase the visibility of their work.
Improved staff morale
Vable boosted motivation and collaboration within the library team while ensuring clinicians had timely access to vital information. This directly underlined the importance of up-to-date knowledge delivery.
Excellent support
The onboarding experience was seamless, with intuitive integration into existing systems and responsive support. Despite an initial learning curve, staff reported that Vable quickly transformed their workflows and provided strong value for money.
Vable helped NHS Lanarkshire improve the frequency of their clinician bulletins, ensuring patient-facing staff have access to the most up to date information when they need it. It transformed a task that took hours, and reduced it to minutes.
NHS Lanarkshire is the third largest health board in Scotland, serving a population of 655,000 across Lanarkshire. It employs around 12,000 staff working in communities, health centres, clinics, offices and three acute hospitals.
Staff from the NHS Lanarkshire team heard about Vable through their K2A network. The health board approached Vable in 2021 for help to streamline the production of bulletins sent out to clinical staff.
The literature searching is a big part of what we do, but current awareness bulletins were something that we also had to produce, and the time taken to produce them was quite significant. And so we were looking for a process that could automate the production of the bulletins, explained Carol Hallesy, head of the Library Knowledge Services team at NHS Lanarkshire.
Massive Time Savings and Efficiency Gains
Vable was confident it could help the Library Knowledge Services team at NHS Lanarkshire to introduce significant improvements to their current processes. Vable transformed an intensive manual bulletin production process into an automated task that now takes minutes instead of hours.
The time savings allowed the team to produce more bulletins - keeping clinical staff more informed - but it also meant they could reallocate focus towards higher-priority goals and services, as well as more strategic work.
It was hours and hours every month to produce bulletins. Vable turned that into a task we could do in minutes, Carol explained.
This is an extra thing I do for various reasons. So, in terms of me being able to do it, Vable makes a difference,” Kavan Stafford, Senior Librarian at NHS Lanarkshire, added. “In a time when budgets and staff time are tight, Vable helps. It frees staff up for other work.
Plus, the automations have had the added impact of boosting the visibility and perceived value of the knowledge team’s output. Kavan explained that they consider great feedback to be a good measure of success, especially the number of clinicians asking to be added to the mailings, and commenting on how valuable it is.
Positive Morale & Clinical Support
Engagement with everyone in the business has been a positive factor since rolling out Vable, which reflects well on the team. Carol outlined that creating the bulletins were time-consuming, burdensome work, which the library team were not sure were being read or used at all.
Vable helped to improve motivation in the team, and improve cross-department collaboration, by significantly reducing the time spent on producing bulletins each month and providing tools for determining who is viewing them. Although Kavan explained that recent changes to NHS processes have since limited their ability to take advantage of some of the reporting functionality.
Vable’s platform also contributed to ensuring that NHS clinicians had access to timely, high-quality literature – helping maintain standards of care and evidence-based practice. As manual processes took so much time, Kavan explained that when internal changes meant the team temporarily were unable to avail the use of Vable, he’d really felt the impact on what he was able to deliver.
“I think we spent a month or six weeks or so without it at the end of last year and that kind of reasserted its value to us, then, because we then had to move to doing manual searches. So in terms of how time-consuming that can be, its value was underlined for us there, and it kind of led us to look at potentially offering fewer e-updates and so on if that was going to continue. Or maybe it would be less regular, like every two months instead of every month, for example, Kavan explained.
By streamlining information delivery, Vable not only eased the workload for librarians, but also played a vital role in improving patient outcomes - ensuring clinicians had timely access to the most relevant and current clinical insights.
Kavan said: Vable helps ensure our clinicians have access to the most up-to-date information to deliver high-quality care.
Ease of Use, Support & Onboarding
A key concern for many companies considering implementing Vable is the challenge of onboarding, particularly if they have to migrate from another provider. But the team at NHS Lanarkshire said they were blown away by how simple the process was, and how much support was available when they did need help.
It linked very much with the bibliographic databases, and it seemed quite an intuitive process. So I think for us that was really the key thing. And obviously we had to look at value for money, and so on, so it seemed to provide good value for money, explained Carol.
Vable was very easy to set up. I thought the support and the onboarding was very good. And the support throughout has been really excellent, we've never had to wait too long for a response. I think in terms of the product and the ease of use [...] I’d certainly be happy to recommend it to anybody.
The praise for how Vable had integrated with their existing workflows, as well as the support available, was supported by Kavan. He admitted that there is a sharp learning curve, but said it had transformed their workflows:
It takes a while to learn, but once you do, Vable can do a huge amount, he said.
Moving Forward
The library team at NHS Lanarkshire could not overestimate the value introducing Vable had on their ability to deliver timely, accurate and relevant information to its clinicians and wider staff.
Carol, particularly, urged any business considering Vable to take the plunge.
I really can’t emphasize this enough - the impact on our team has been huge.
Find out how Vable helps all kinds of professional service firms and companies to manage their information needs.
