Improving availability communication: finding the right contact with on-call rostering transparency
Efficient on-call rostering is essential for hospitals to ensure critical roles are always reachable when needed.
Ikonix Connect streamlines this process by giving your team the tools to manage on-call roles and rosters with ease, clarity, and flexibility—fully integrated into your communication system.
Workforce scheduling in hospitals is no small task—it’s a carefully balanced process that considers numerous factors like skills, workload, awards and enterprise agreements, holidays, and staff availability.
While many organisations face these challenges, healthcare adds a unique layer of complexity. Hospitals rely on on-call personnel who may work across multiple wards or departments, cover entire networks or districts, or respond from home when urgent situations arise. Managing this level of flexibility and coverage demands a smart and seamless solution.
Effective rostering requires balancing three key areas of complexity:
- Staffing: Determining the number of staff needed to meet current and forecast demand, such as the number of beds available.
- Scheduling: Ensuring personnel are available to fill roles and be on-site at the right times, covering hours of the day and days of the week.
- Assignment: Linking personnel to specific tasks, such as calling in an on-call clinician when a patient presents and immediate care is required.
These factors also need to account for handovers, where tasks are passed on as shifts change, ensuring continuity of care.
Planning for these complexities requires meticulous attention to detail and a transparent system to display both the current and future state. As variables shift—such as personnel entering or exiting duty roles—the rest of the team needs reliable, up-to-date access to the person in the role to maintain seamless care delivery.
Ikonix Technology has spent years working closely with switchboards in some of Australia’s largest and busiest public hospitals.
Through this experience, we’ve observed the diverse ways hospitals manage on-call rostering. While rosters often begin in scheduling software, the need for constant updates—such as daily changes and inter-department communication—frequently turns them into a chaotic mix of printed sheets, sticky notes, and handwritten edits.
This information is then passed to central switchboard teams, who are tasked with recording and relaying it accurately. These manual processes not only create bottlenecks but also introduce delays that can impact the timely delivery of care.
How can this impact healthcare?
Patient outcomes
Delays in reaching the right personnel can compromise patient care, particularly in critical situations where timely intervention is vital.
Workload
Inefficient processes add strain to an already stretched workforce, affecting staff wellbeing and contributing to burnout and turnover.
Patient flow & admin
Slower communication disrupts the flow of patients through the hospital, directly impacting admissions, discharges, and overall administrative efficiency.
How does Ikonix Technology address this?
Recording the on-call roster.
As part of the Ikonix Unified Messaging Suite, Ikonix WebConnect offers a browser-based switchboard and system administration interface.
Within this platform, we’ve developed an intuitive module for managing on-call rostering.
Key features include:
Shift Creation: Easily define open shifts and assign personnel from your directory with a simple drag-and-drop interface.
Template Management: Create templates and replicate rosters to streamline scheduling, ensuring efficiency over time.
These tools simplify the rostering process, enhancing operational efficiency and ensuring your team is always prepared.
The roster seamlessly integrates with the Ikonix Connect mobile app, ensuring that any shift changes are instantly updated and visible to all staff.
With Ikonix Connect, departing and arriving personnel can easily hand over or take on on-call responsibilities (‘roles’). This includes scenarios where a clinician leaving the hospital can transfer their on-call duties to a remote worker, who remains on-call from home and only comes on-site when required.
When assistance is needed, staff can message the designated role directly, and the contact is automatically routed to the available on-call person.
The app also provides a clear, real-time view of who is online and available, helping teams quickly connect and coordinate care.
We understand that not everyone in the hospital may use Ikonix Connect. That’s why we’ve also developed a simple, secure web portal for accessing current roster contact information.
This roster can be published to the hospital or health network’s intranet, allowing securely logged-in users to view contact details without needing to go through the switchboard. By removing these bottlenecks, teams are empowered to find the right assistance more quickly, ensuring smoother operations and faster care delivery.
Who does this benefit?
Switchboard teams
Switchboard teams are responsible for maintaining accurate records to ensure communication reaches the right personnel. By streamlining record-keeping, Ikonix Connect reduces this burden, allowing switchboard teams to focus on delivering quick and accurate responses in critical situations.
Departments
Workforce leaders can easily manage the on-call roster, giving them better control over staffing levels and workload. They can also keep rosters up to date and accessible to the entire team, removing the need for constant updates to switchboard operators and ensuring accurate information is always available.
Users
Frontline staff, including clinicians, need to quickly find available assistance when needed, such as a specialist consultant. By consolidating roster information into a single, accurate source, Ikonix Connect eliminates bottlenecks and enables faster, more efficient communication without relying on the switchboard.
David Fairlie-Jones
Senior Program Manager
As the product manager for Ikonix Connect, David works with hospital teams to identify workflows and role requirements, customising the implementation of this solution for some of Australia’s largest and most complex health networks.