Health Recruitment Hackathon

Over the course of a day, we worked with over 40 members of the North Metropolitan Health Service community to rapidly explore new solutions to challenges in their recruitment process. Our key challenged was to reduce the time to complete the recruitment of doctors and nurses, caused by numerous approval steps and wasted effort due to rework.

North Metropolitan Health Service is an extensive hospital and health service network that aims to maintain and improve the health and wellbeing of more than 729,144 people (approximately 28% of Western Australia's total population) within a catchment area of almost 1,000 square kilometres. NMHS includes Perth Children's Hospital and Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital and employs over 10,000 staff.

During the hackathon we used human-centred design to rapidly explore challenges within the component parts of the recruitment process and identify key blockers that we needed to solve.

Working with the nurses, doctors and health support workers experiencing these problems, we then used a series of techniques to rapidly ideate creative solutions, and develop a series of ideas to prototype.

The day culminated in a pitch to senior Executives and resulted in 2 quick wins ideas being approved immediately, and a series of larger projects to enter the planning phase.

In summary, the hackathon achieved the following benefits:

• Over 40 ideas generated
• Over 7 ideas approved
• An opportunity to foster collaboration between areas of the organisation that did not often get to collaborate
• New skills, tools and mindsets that can be applied to other problems at NMHS