Workforce challenges are a universal problem for most organisations. We aim to take the focus away from roles and move the lens to people and context, thinking about the art of the possible. Tackling workforce quandaries differently helps unlock a range of innovative potential solutions that we would never see when taking a top-level view of your workforce.
We'll be talking about the following topic at the Primary Care Conference
We support people and organisations to look through their specific lens, bringing in our expertise to help them to take this approach and identify potential opportunities.
How do we make the move away from a very fixed and traditional workforce planning?
Workforce optimisation is our conceptual model for framing our thinking on how we do workforce planning, delivery, and strategy, at SCW. We look at the workforce from three key perspectives; the content of the work and the skills required by the workforce, the processes including team or organisational dynamics that will influence the experiences of the workforce and the context of the environment and organisational mindset that will determine the direction and speed of change for the workforce. We’ve used it in a range of different areas and settings, including primary care, clients in acute settings and children and young people’s mental health services to name a few.
We want to share the knowledge that we have built and help people and organisations to think about conceptualising their workforce problems differently. Our offer ranges from delivering a comprehensive review on behalf of organisations, to designing tools to support organisations to review their own workforce optimisation or for more mature clients, building capability in workforce optimisation for themselves.
We’d like to share a few examples to show how the different approaches work:
Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire & Berkshire West (BOB) Integrated Care System (ICS)
Recruiting the right staff, with the right skills and retaining them has always been a challenge in primary care. We were asked by BOB ICS to drive innovative primary care workforce planning as part of an early adopter programme.
In collaboration with other teams across SCW, we carried out a deep dive into data and insights to develop a comprehensive pack for primary care networks (PCNs), with recommendations around key workforce planning, strategy, and delivery capabilities.
The focus of our workforce team was to support PCNs thinking about how they could put people at the centre of their approach by considering what the patient need is and who in the workforce has the skill or potential to address that need. The review included understanding how the PCN worked, what the culture was like and their readiness for changing the way they worked. We explored what that would mean for their workforce in the short-term and long-term. We helped them translate their existing evidence into practical insights i.e. considering alternative roles to ones that they would ordinarily recruit and consideration of how they can build their talent management strategy.
We delivered:
- A comprehensive review, including national and local insights
- Recommendations relating to attraction, recruitment, supply and retention, new ways of working, building a sustainable approach to workforce optimisation and considerations for PCN development and leadership
- A practical action plan that they were able to take away and move forward
- Bespoke support in terms of their level of readiness for change
Redesigning and optimisation - children’s mental health services
We have also applied our workforce optimisation approach with a number of clients tackling workforce challenges for children and mental health services. This has included reviewing the workforce discipline mix across healthcare, social care and voluntary community and social enterprises (VCSEs) and identifying opportunities for aligning workforce planning, strategy and delivery across the ICS footprint, and redesigning a specialist paediatric liaison service. Some of the common problems we have seen are services not aligning workforce skills and capabilities to the priority outcomes that they wish to achieve for children and young people.
Rather than carry out a comprehensive review, we supported clients to understand how to profile roles themselves to understand the extent to which they can contribute to priority outcomes and how to identify alternative roles, where traditional roles are high demand and low supply.
By working collaboratively with clients, we were able to develop a bespoke tool kit that maps roles against priority outcomes using both external data and insights into the content, processes, and context of their organisation. We were also able to develop the capability amongst service leads to continue to make evidence-based decisions in their approach to workforce planning, strategy and delivery.
METIS Programme with NHS England and Improvement (NHSEI) South West diagnostics
We were commissioned by NHSEI, South West region to design and deliver a bespoke development programme to support service leads across diagnostic services to have the skills and capabilities for carrying out workforce optimisation themselves.
We developed the METIS programme, which included:
- Self-directed learning modules
- World café events
- Design of bespoke training
- Development of a community of practice
- Evaluation
This provided service leads with an understanding of how to explore data and insights and translate these into tangible actions to identify what they needed to do moving forward and how they would address gaps and leverage opportunities to be sustainable for the future.
To summarise, to be successful at workforce optimisation, think big picture, and consider external and environmental factors that are going to influence your specific workforce situation. Find the best available evidence and data for making short-term and long-term workforce decisions. Further, to optimise your teams try taking a skills-based approach and mapping these to your local population's health needs. Most importantly, start with putting individuals at the centre of workforce strategy, designing solutions and approaches that, create a happy, motivated and sustainable workforce.
For more information on workforce optimisation,
