In recent years, the People Solutions team here at NHS South, Central and West (SCW) has been working very closely with providers, provider collaboratives and systems to help them drive down high-cost agency spend.
As you can imagine, the root causes and drivers of temporary staffing requirements are complex and wide ranging. They can cover a range of challenges, from the obvious skills shortages within the labour market for high demand roles and local management practices around e-rostering and annual leave, to more nuanced challenges around creating cultures of inclusion that support retention and wellbeing of a diverse workforce.
Developing a holistic methodology
Through our work we have developed a methodology based on a holistic approach, not just looking at the operational activities of bank and agency management teams and ensuring commercial framework use is optimised, but looking at the wider drivers and influences that cause the need for any initial temporary staffing demand in the first place.
Shifting the focus
When we start to look at agency spend as a symptom of a set of wider, complex, workforce challenges, the wicked problem shifts from ‘do you have an agency spend challenge?’ to ‘do you have a workforce productivity and efficiency challenge?’.
Does that change in focus make a difference? Absolutely. Shifting the challenge away from the symptom that is agency spend to a wider lens of workforce productivity and efficiency allows us the mental space and permission to think differently. From there, we have the opportunity to look at both the wider causes and symptoms of workforce challenges and financially quantify the scale of the opportunity for workforce transformation. This could include exploring elements such as the average time to hire figure and the associated reduction in temporary staffing needs and spend if time to hire could be aligned to that of similar organisations, or quantifying how reducing sickness absence rates could cut flexible workforce costs.
Quantifying opportunity and impact
In times of increased financial scrutiny and pressure, quantifying the impacts of and potential opportunities within wider workforce productivity and efficiency areas can help to provide assurance for business cases for investment in workforce transformation, highlighting the art of the possible and quantifying the opportunities that investment can create. This can support growing confidence in and gaining backing for ‘softer’ people interventions, as potential tangible impacts are more visible.
So next time you are battling the wicked problem of agency spend, ask yourself if you actually have an agency spend issue, or is it a wider workforce productivity and efficiency challenge?
If you are ready to take think differently about your agency spend challenges please contact
