Covid Clinical Assessment Service (CCAS)

About CCAS

In early 2020, the UK was hit by the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the NHS saw an unprecedented demand for services, placing tremendous pressure on the service and excessive shortages in staff.

In response, the UK Government set up the Covid-19 Clinical Assessment Service (CCAS). A temporary service that was rapidly mobilised as a part of the UK’s national response to the pandemic.
Credentially was asked by NHS England to assist in the national Covid response after volunteering their team and technology to assist any NHS provider struggling to quickly onboard an emergency workforce.

Problem

The project, led by the South Central and West Commissioning Support Unit (SC & WCSU) and South-Central Ambulance Services was facing the enormous challenge of recruiting and vetting tens of thousands of staff, including recently retired GPs, AHPs and Paramedics, in a situation of acute time pressure.
Working hard to ensure staff were hired quickly to respond to the crisis.

The team were processing around 50 candidates per week. Not nearly enough to support the demand.

Solution

Credentially was asked to assist and work with existing NHS systems, including, an established web interface, DBS provider, along with calendar and booking systems.

Within 3 weeks, Credentially had:

• Scoped the requirements of CCAS
• Set up roles required in the system
• Ran test candidates
• Made desired alterations
• Trained over 45 administrators
• Integrated the system with the established systems to facilitate the ease of onboarding for candidates.

Results

Within 3 weeks CCAS had onboarded over 3000 staff.

Allowing new roles to be quickly added and onboarded - providing support to both administrators and candidates.
As a result, Credentially enabled CCAS to quickly increase their ability to process candidates from 50 to over 1000 per week - that's a 1900% increase.