What was the challenge?
In 2018 the Central Adelaide Local Health Network, South Australia's largest, running the Royal Adelaide Hospital, the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and three other sites with more than 14,000 staff, was forecasting a budget overrun of several hundred million dollars. After a diagnostic review, the state appointed KordaMentha as administrator to lead a three-year organisational and financial recovery.
One of the four recovery workstreams was people, industrial relations and workforce optimisation. It could not start from estimates. A network of that size, newly moved into the new Royal Adelaide Hospital, needed a single, consistent picture of its workforce, department by department, built to the enterprise agreements, before anyone could decide what should change.
What did Health-e do?
KordaMentha brought Health-e in during the administration to provide the FTE planning and modelling behind that workstream.
Health-e loaded the network's payroll, roster and organisation structure data and built a workforce profile for every department, validated with managers and costed to the South Australian public sector enterprise agreements. That gave the administrators and the network's executive one baseline that finance, nursing and operations all recognised.
From that baseline, alternate models were built and tested with department managers rather than imposed on them. Each model showed what a change in roster pattern, skill mix or service hours would mean for the department's workforce, so the people who ran the wards could see and challenge the evidence before anything was decided.
What were the results?
KordaMentha has described the turnaround publicly: a new organisational structure, forty new leaders across executive and management roles, a board-to-ward accountability framework, and a sustained improvement in the network's cost efficiency against the national benchmark. KordaMentha's partner on the engagement has said what made the difference was that the workforce "responded to evidence".
Health-e's part was the evidence. Every department's workforce was profiled on the same basis, every model was built from the same data, and every proposal in the workforce workstream could be traced back to a roster and an agreement.
What does this make possible?
A health network in recovery can make workforce decisions from one agreed baseline rather than competing spreadsheets, and can take those decisions to managers and industrial partners with the roster and the agreement behind each one.
The modelling that supports an administrator is the same modelling that supports a budget build or a new hospital: a profile for every department, costed to the agreement, tested with the people who run it.