Mapping Service Change: identify the purpose and shape of any proposed service change that will impact on future workforce requirements.
This is the first of three interrelated steps. This is the process of service redesign in response to patient choice, advances in care or financial constraints. You must be very clear about current costs and outcomes and identify the intended benefits from service change. You should identify those forces that support the change or may hamper it. There must be a clear statement about whether the preferred model better delivers the desired benefits or is more likely to be achievable, given anticipated constraints.
Goals/benefits of change
What are the objectives and anticipated benefits of the proposed service change?
Current baseline
What are current service costs and current performance measures?
Drivers/constraints
What context must the new service operate within? What forces will support the change in services and what resistance is expected?
Option appraisal
What different scenarios for service change have been considered/costed?
Working models
What is the preferred model(s) and why?
This is a guide to care pathways. A care pathway describes all the activities that need to happen as a patient with a particular condition moves through the care system.
The scenarios presented within the guide include the following:
Scenario 1: leadership
This scenario explores the issue of leadership as a key factor for the successful delivery of EWTD.
Scenario 2: rota review
This scenario considers the management of existing rotas with potential cost implications.
Scenario 3: new and enhanced roles
This scenario considers the development and contribution of new and enhanced roles.
Scenario 4: generic foundation programme rota
This scenario looks at issues associated with achieving EWTD 2009 within rotas established for foundation programmes and submits a suggested proposal for a generic rota solution.
The benefits realisation and business case, details how implementing Hospital at Night can lead to increases in productivity and can have clinical and financial benefits.
Strategic Health Asset Planning and Evaluation (SHAPE) >>>
Supports step 3, section 3 by enabling users to take into account their existing workforce. It also aims to tackle section 3.2 by analysing what workforce is required to perform the designated tasks and 3.4 how users plan to achieve this.
What does it do?
SHAPE provides SHAs and PCTs with a unique and comprehensive, robust, evidence-based resource system, bringing together existing national data sets of clinical activity, human geography and healthcare estate assets, supported by Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology. In addition, the scenario planning features can help planners to determine the service configuration that provides the best affordable access to care.
What does it do?
The change capability appraisal toolset is designed to help local health communities to assess their own capacity to deliver successful service transformation.
Scenario generator is a software tool specifically designed to allow simulation of whole health and social care systems. It comes pre-configured with population and prevalence data, and with a number of generic pathways of care. Users can modify all the defaults, change existing pathways or create new ones and develop any number of what-if scenarios. The behaviour of each scenario can then be explored by simulating healthcare activity for one to 10 years or more. Detailed results for each part of the model are provided of activity, flow, capacity, queues and cost.
What is the Roadmap to Transformational Change?
The RTC is a framework that enables health and social care organisations to design, plan and deliver integrated and transformational change that is both successful and sustainable: it is relevant to both commissioners and providers and can be used across an LHC, a clinical network and an individual trust or organisation.
The framework is currently set out as an iterative journey through five phases: however, change leaders and change agents can choose to start at any phase and should be guided in doing so by their priorities and by what it is feasible for them to achieve. If, for example, an organisation, network or community starts by using the RTC to improve the way they specify and plan projects and ensure that these are focused on the realisation of benefits, it is likely that they will need to cycle back later to consider both the integrated change programmes to which their projects (should) contribute and to the strategy that sets the direction for change.
Now you’ve experienced the Six Steps Methodology to Integrated Workforce Planning, we’d love to hear your opinions about the resource, and how it can continue to be developed in the future. We’d also love to hear from you if you have any suggestions of further electronic tools that could be used to help put together a workforce plan.
Six Steps 
