Remote Working In A CIS

Adapting the model designed by the American Cancer Society

Last year the American Cancer Society described their project to run their CIS completely virtually (https://icisg.org/resources/best-practices-monthly-feature/2018-2/virtual-cancer-information-center/).  This article, along with developments in IT infrastructure at CRUK got me thinking about whether we could run our service in a similar way.  This could solve a number of problems for us, firstly it would broaden the pool of nurses who we could employ, (currently they need to be within traveling distance of our London office), it would allow us to continue working even if for any reason our building was inaccessible, and it could be seen as a benefit to staff if they had the option of working from home.

But there is one key difference between the CRUK CIS and the American Cancer Society CIS, we are much smaller with far fewer staff.  So, before we decided to change anything, I needed to establish what the pros and cons of various models would be for us in our circumstances.  Most importantly I needed to see what the current team felt about the proposal and what their insights were as to how and if it would work for us.

To do this we held a workshop with an innovation facilitator.  From this we decided that what would work best for us would be a mixed model, where we still have staff working in a central base but start to have a few staff working remotely, some splitting their time between home and office-based working.

The project coincided with one experienced member of the team wanting to relocate away from London.  This gave us a good opportunity to test the model and see what worked and what didn’t.

Our current pattern is to have this staff member working at home every day, one other staff member works form home once a week and the others can do this on an ad hoc basis if there are occasions when working from home would suit them for personal reasons. 

We have also tested running the service for one day with us all based at home.  This gave us a good test for responding to any future emergency situations which prevented us from being able to get into the building.  These could be large scale public transport disruption, or a terrorist attack in central London.

With current technology it all seems to be working well, we hold team meetings over skype and have a running conversation “chat” in Microsoft Teams so that we all feel connected.

Before giving permission for staff to work from home they also need to assure us that they have the right kind of space to be able to work on the helpline uninterrupted and without being overheard to maintain the confidentiality of the service.

They also need to have adequate broadband provision and be prepared to take their CRUK lap top home with them to work from.

Our next step will be to look at how best to train and support them remotely.  We hope to develop tools to test this next year.     

For more information, please contact Martin Ledwick Martin.ledwick@cancer.org.uk