Statform

Ebony Ranclaud

Ebony Ranclaud is the Founder of Statform, a platform helping to place nurses where they’re needed. Stat.

A registered aged care nurse for more than 10 years, Ebony admits she was lured into her occupation in no small way by the tender depiction of old age in the film, The Notebook.

“Embarking on my nursing degree I had never actually encountered any old people who were unwell. I pictured aged care like the end of The Notebook - sweet ladies in pearls, and men sipping scotch,” says Ebony.

The reality, of course, paints a very different picture, but Ebony explains there is still a very special sentimentality that accompanies with her kind of work.

“In aged care your patients are some of the most vulnerable, and they live where you work, so you share a longer and deeper relationship. It’s a uniquely special environment,” says Ebony.

Although rising through the ranks of her sector, Ebony encountered a common drawback.

“The more senior I become, the more administration I have to oversee, and the less nursing I get to do,” says Ebony.

A key frustration is the time she spends managing rosters when staff call in sick or need to isolate – a problem exacerbated by COVID-19.

“Dealing with vulnerable people, nurses in aged care call in sick for a wide range of reasons. The bleak reality is, if you come in sick you could kill someone,” says Ebony.

In aged care facilities, if a team member phones in sick, the current approach is to phone a nursing agency and request a staff member, then wait for them to call back with the outcome. If they are unable to supply staff, the next agency is phoned and the process repeats until the shift is filled. Typically, this takes the most senior clinical registered nurse (RN) off the floor.

In addition to single shift vacancies, aged care facilities generally operate with high vacancy rates in ongoing roles.

“Around one in four Australian aged care facilities already have an open position, before you compound the impacts of single shift vacancies and COVID-19 isolation,” says Ebony.

Ebony estimates that sourcing staff diverts at least 60% of her available time at work. Time she could spend on more important things.

“You’re relentlessly checking your phone and email to ensure you haven’t missed anything. It’s impossible to complete any meaningful work in that time because you’re never entirely present,” says Ebony.

The price of failing to fill a shift can be high, letting down her patients, her team, and her family.

“If staff don’t turn up, patients don’t get the best care. For the team, it means working short staffed. And if I stay back to help, it means calling my partner to again apologise for not being home to cook dinner or spend time with the kids.”

“It creates a lot of background anxiety for everyone involved, which contributes to burnout.”

Ebony says key findings from the aged care royal commission elucidated other significant challenges for the aged care workforce.

“Most of the workforce is made up of unregulated transient workers, and COVID 19 has brought to light that many of these workers operate across multiple sites and organisations to make up full-time hours, making contact tracing complex. Currently, there is no single, connected source of information for this workforce.”

Ebony’s solution is Statform, a platform for filling a single nursing shift. Stat.

Statform enables an ad for a single shift to be posted, simultaneously reaching everyone that could be available, creating more timely responses to job posts. This could include internal staff pools, contracted nursing agencies, or anyone connected to the platform, including freelance workers who pay a subscription fee.

The platform will allow facilities to see temporary workforce spending in real time, pay invoices and collect workforce data to help inform peak and off-peak pricing, trends in staffing needs, and enable a single source of truth for worker credentials and immunisations.

Before the Female Founders Program, Ebony’s approach with Statform was to move slowly and surely for fear of failing. Now she’s afraid of not moving fast enough.

“Everything crystallised for me in week one with the introduction of the lean business model concept. It was a real tipping point for me,” says Ebony.

“Before, I aimed for perfection, afraid that certain things would fail or that someone might steal my idea. That mindset has completely shifted.”

Another realisation was that Newcastle is “as good or better than Sydney for startups.”

“I wasn’t aware of what Newcastle had to offer and had feared that it couldn’t compete with larger cities. The startup ecosystem is well established in Newcastle with all the right components to help any startup succeed.”

The greatest value, she offers, was the chance to connect with impressive, like-minded women on a similar journey.

“We all suffer at times from imposter syndrome and confidence issues. The chance to be around other women also taking risks, and to reflect as a group on these shared feelings was very special, and very validating,” says Ebony.

As Statform moves toward its next milestone of a minimum viable product (MVP) and customer trials, Ebony can’t help but contemplate all the ways the platform could help people and organisations.

“There’s definitely an opportunity to develop Statform for wider use across the fields of nursing and medicine, but it could be a springboard for many other things.”