The new Six Steps Methodology to Integrated Workforce Planning is now available and set to be an essential tool helping workforce planners meet the Working Time Directive.
Produced by Workforce Projects Team, the methodology 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.
The main aim is to ensure healthcare organisations have the right people, with the right skills, in correct roles, at the right time. The methodology then sets out all the elements required to ensure this and deliver an effective workforce plan.
Workforce plans are prepared on a number of levels. Locally, there are plans (staffing rotas) prepared once a month by a ward manager to ensure their ward has all its shifts covered by staff with the correct skills and competences to ensure patient services are delivered safely and effectively. Conversely, there are Strategic Health Authority level workforce plans which might be an aggregation of all the plans submitted by the Primary Care Trusts and by provider organisations which are used to support strategic and financial planning and education commissioning.
The resource features six distinct stages that take users through the process of designing their workforce plan, they are:
Defining the plan
Mapping service change
Defining the required workforce
Understanding workforce availability
Planning to deliver the required workforce
Implement, monitor and refresh.
Lisa Navin, tools and techniques programme lead for Skills for Health - Workforce Projects Team, said: “With the deadline for the implementation of Working Time Directive for junior doctors getting ever closer, the importance of tools that can help to produce compliant rotas is growing and growing.
“The new Six Steps Methodology to Integrated Workforce Planning is the perfect example of such a tool, as it helps 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 methodology is available both as a printed document and from the healthcare workforce portal, where a specially developed area has been set up featuring a host of interactive tools and resources to help you implement your workforce plan.
www.healthcareworkforce.nhs.uk/sixstepsonline
Working Time Directive 2009 
