Workforce Design & Planning
Statement of Importance
Having effective Workforce Design and Development practices in place combining need, service models to meet that need and workforce consequences across all agencies is absolutely fundamental to enable services to be staffed appropriately over the coming years.
The development of effective workforce design and planning practices across all agencies is fundamental to enable services to be staffed appropriately in the future. Workforce planning means many things to many people. At its simplest workforce planning is about trying to predict the future demand for different types of staff and seeking to match this with supply. Doing so will, however, require a more holistic approach to workforce planning than has been the case. The range of HR policies, including education, training, pay, skill mix, recruitment and retention, and career structure issues as well as technical supply and demand modeling need to brought together in a process of workforce development of which workforce planning as traditionally defined is only a part, albeit an important part.
A fundamental cultural change will also be required to put the consumer of services, rather than staff as the providers of services, at the heart of workforce planning. Workforce planning does not take place in a vacuum. In the case of health and social care its fundamental purpose is to ensure that there are sufficient numbers of staff available with the right skills to deliver high quality care to children, young people and their families. Workforce planning, in other words, is an activity done to support care and not for its own sake.
Workforce development has to start from the definition of the services and potential services the public need. This in turn needs to drive debate on the skills and competencies required to deliver these services and thus the numbers and types of staff required. In assessing staffing requirements it will be increasingly important to recognise that it is the skills and knowledge that staff can bring that are important rather than simply their professional background. It will be important also to recognise that staff are not involved only in direct care but in a range of other related work including, teaching, clinical governance, management, administration, further training and development all of which takes time and requires specific skills.
Education and training need to be responsive to the skills and competencies required for healthcare delivery. It is critically important that the needs of patients for care, and of the NHS and others as providers of care, drive the education and training agenda. Finally the continuing process of service development will highlight changes in clinical practice which will need to be fed systematically into thinking about service provision and into training and education. It will be important that, in considering the nature of the workforce required in future, planners do not simply fight yesterday’s battles. A number of challenges have been identified:
- Insufficient ownership and prioritisation at top level of organisations
- Lack of capacity / capability to undertake workforce design and planning within CAMHS
- Ineffective joint working across statutory and non-statutory services
- Lack of effective feedback to contributors to the process leading to a lack of ownership
- Incompatible data within and between organisations, and the data needs at national from those at local level