News and information from Skills for Health – Workforce Projects Team

30th September 2008

First step forward for new Six Steps

Healthcare workforce planners have another tool to help them make the recruitment, retention and organisation of staff easier and more sustainable.

The highly anticipated Six Steps Methodology to Integrated Workforce Planning is now available from Skills for Health – Workforce Projects Team, and helps ensure that decisions made around the design and recruitment of new staff and teams are robust, realistic and fully support the delivery of quality patient care and productivity and efficiency.

It takes the user through six clear steps to develop their workforce plan. Planners can use the methodology as an educational resource or refer to it as a best practice guide when they are developing future plans.

To accompany the resource, a new interactive area of the healthcare workforce portal has been developed to offer users a range of workforce planning tools, techniques and resources to support the development of a sustainable and evidence based workforce plan.

Lisa Navin, Workforce Projects Team programme lead for tools and techniques said: “We are delighted to release the new Six Steps Methodology to Integrated Workforce Planning. The new Six Steps provides a number of significant developments to workforce planning whilst retaining the core values of its predecessor.

“Use of the Six Steps across workforce planning will help ensure that decisions made around design and recruitment of new staff and teams are sustainable, realistic and fully support the delivery of quality patient care.

“The Six Steps Methodology to Integrated Workforce Planning is supported by a full interactive area on the Healthcare Workforce portal, which provides even more support to workforce planners.”

To find out more about the Six Steps Methodology to Integrated Workforce Planning, visit www.healthcareworkforce.nhs.uk/sixstepsonline.

Notes for Editors:

For more information contact Dan Shires, communications officer, Skills for Health – Workforce Projects Team. Tel: 0161 266 2130 Email: daniel.shires@skillsforhealth.org.uk.