Tempo: Transforming workforce planning in primary care
Find out how Tempo is helping primary care organisations manage increasingly complex workforces through smarter planning, rostering and operational intelligence.
Meet Dr Phil Wallek, fellow and Founder of Tempo. Drawing on firsthand experience as a GP partner and clinical leader, Phil developed Tempo to address one of primary care’s most persistent operational challenges: effectively managing workforce capacity across growing, multidisciplinary organisations. By bringing workforce planning, rostering, leave management, locum booking and business intelligence into a single platform, Tempo is helping practices reduce administrative burden, improve workforce utilisation and make more informed decisions about service delivery.
What is Tempo and what problem does it solve?
Tempo is a workforce planning, rostering and business intelligence platform designed specifically for primary care.
General practice has evolved significantly in recent years. Organisations are becoming larger, operating across multiple sites and employing increasingly diverse multidisciplinary teams. Yet many practices continue to rely on spreadsheets and disconnected systems to manage their workforce, creating considerable administrative burden and limiting visibility of capacity, costs and operational pressures.
Tempo brings workforce planning, staff rostering, leave management, locum coordination and operational intelligence together in one platform. It enables practices to build complex rotas more efficiently and can upload schedules directly into clinical systems such as SystmOne.
The platform can reduce the administrative time associated with rota management by more than 50%, while helping minimise errors and providing organisations with clearer insight into workforce capacity, operational performance and service demand.
“Tempo helps primary care organisations use their workforce more effectively and plan more sustainable services for patients.”
What was your inspiration and motivation?
Tempo grew directly from Phil’s experience as a GP partner and clinical leader.
He led the merger of three GP practices in Lewes to create Foundry Healthcare, which now serves around 28,500 patients. As the organisation expanded, managing the workforce became increasingly complex. There were multiple sites, a growing range of professional roles and services operating across different timescales, yet the tools available were not designed for the realities of modern primary care.
He initially built a solution to address his own operational challenges, but it quickly became clear that practices across the country were facing many of the same issues.
Phil’s motivation has always been to equip primary care leaders with better tools and information to support decision-making. General practice is under significant pressure, but there remains substantial opportunity to reduce avoidable administration, deploy multidisciplinary teams more effectively and better match workforce capacity to patient need.
“As a practising GP, I remain very conscious that better operational systems should ultimately result in better and more sustainable care for patients.”
“As a practising GP, I remain very conscious that better operational systems should ultimately result in better and more sustainable care for patients.”
Why did you become a fellow?
For Phil, becoming an NHS Innovation Accelerator fellow is both a privilege and an important opportunity to learn.
The Fellowship provides access to a community of innovators, NHS leaders and experienced mentors who understand the challenges involved in introducing and scaling innovation across healthcare. That support is particularly valuable because successful adoption requires much more than good technology. It depends on understanding clinical workflows, organisational change, evidence generation, procurement and the varied needs of NHS organisations.
The Fellowship gives Phil the opportunity to challenge assumptions, learn from others and build the partnerships needed to take Tempo to the next stage of its development. It is also valuable recognition of the role that workforce planning and operational intelligence can play in creating a more sustainable future for primary care.
“The opportunity to learn from fellow innovators and NHS leaders while developing solutions for primary care is incredibly valuable.”
Looking ahead
Over the next five years, Phil hopes to see Tempo become a widely adopted workforce planning and intelligence platform for primary care organisations across the NHS.
The ambition is to support organisations ranging from individual GP practices to large-scale providers, Primary Care Networks and Integrated Care Systems. Phil wants to connect workforce and rota data with information on clinical demand, telephony, online access and finances, enabling leaders to gain a more complete understanding of pressures across their services and make evidence-based decisions about capacity and investment.
He also wants to see Tempo support the development of the future primary care workforce, including improving how GP training placements are planned and allocated.
Most importantly, the hope is to demonstrate measurable benefits for the NHS: reduced administrative workload, better workforce utilisation, improved financial sustainability and more responsive services for patients.
“I hope we can show that better workforce planning is fundamental to creating sustainable services for both staff and patients.”
Want to find out more? Visit the innovation page where you can contact the innovator directly, or check out their website.
