Home Icon’s Agile Radiation Therapy Tool (ART)

Icon’s Global Agile Radiation Therapy Tool (ART)

A radiation therapist workload management and resource initiative

Creating a sustainable approach to radiation therapy and healthcare workforce shortages

Icon’s innovative Global Agile Radiation Therapy Workforce Tool (ART) addresses the healthcare workforce crisis by enabling resource-sharing across Icon’s global network, mitigating burnout and human errors that arise from siloed operations. By redistributing available time from sites with capacity to those in need, we enhance care delivery closer to home, particularly in smaller, underserved areas.

This approach not only reduces the volatility of workloads at individual sites, managing staff risk of burnout, but also improves patient care, efficiencies, and quality. This initiative addresses a growing global healthcare workforce shortage and deserves recognition for its innovation and addressing a growing need.

Why ART?

ART originated amidst growing challenges in recruiting sufficient staff and managing workload fluctuations across Icon Group.

As we expanded into regional centres offering advanced medical techniques and technologies, the need for a robust support system became evident. These specialised services required meticulous planning and delivery, intensifying pressure on our sites. To gauge this, we undertook site-specific evaluations, revealing that staff shortages often led to treatment delays, as well as staff overwhelm and burnout. Our workload management and resource solution for radiation therapists, effectively redistributes resources, ensuring continuity in patient care even during staff absences.

This initiative has led to a more flexible, responsive staffing model, reducing the strain on individual sites, and enhancing overall service delivery. By maintaining treatment schedules consistently, we’ve improved patient outcomes, time to treatment, and staff morale, including more time for professional development.

Implentation process

The implementation of the Global ART Workforce Tool followed a meticulous, multi-staged process:

Workload analysis: conducted by an analyst and clinical leaders to understand existing pressures.
Forecasting: projected staffing needs over five years, establishing a baseline for improvements.
Stakeholder engagement: we involved staff at all sites in developing a workload management model and a real-time dashboard using Power BI for transparent resource allocation.
Phased onboarding: piloted and initiated state by state in Australia, allowing real-time adjustments and feedback to refine processes.
Guideline development: standardised scheduling and rostering practices to ensure consistency across all sites, and subsequent implementation across our entire Australian network.
Management oversight: We have appointed a manager to oversee workload distribution which has been initially piloted in Queensland, Australia, with plans for broader implementation.

Learnings and outcomes

The impact of this tool has been significant, beginning in Australia and now expanding across various regions, including into Asia, and disciplines beyond radiotherapy. This initiative has led to a more flexible, responsive staffing model, reducing the strain on individual sites, and enhancing overall service delivery. By maintaining treatment schedules consistently, we’ve improved patient outcomes, time to treatment, and staff morale, including more time for professional development.

Learnings:

Data and consistent communication are key and guides decision making
Flow on effects of visibility of data need to be considered

Outcomes:

Improved transparency and workload sharing across network
Sclable tool that can be used for multiple craft groups and large georgraphical footprint
Ability to manage workload better and still allow for non-clinical work – i.e. professional development
Reduced staff burnout and increased engagement

RT Dashboard

An RT Capacity Dashboard was developed to show a day by day view of workloads and differentiation of available hours per site.

The capacity % represented in hours or available or deficit time – based on tasks booked into the clinic daily.

Screenshot to the right displays a regional view demonstrating 11 different sites.

Increased capacity

The quantitative and qualitative impacts of this initiative demonstrates improved operational efficiency and patient care. The graphs highhlight the large variance across sites with the second highlighting the increase in cross site workload share since the RT capacity dashboard implementation. This shows the successful utilisation of a national network to increase capacity and reduce RT workload variance.

ART has also established site workload management practices and network loevel to enable better workload balance – identifying site specific workflows and trends, booking bottlenecks, rsotering and RT allocation.