Solutions to the major challenge of meeting next year’s WTD deadline and the evidence to prove they are effective were at the centre of the 2nd July exhibition.
As well as results from the pilot sites, the Skills for Health - Workforce Projects Team’s* workforce planning specialists and NHS East of England’s Workforce Programmes Team all offered delegates resources to help bring about the changes necessary to achieve compliance.
The Skills for Health - Workforce Projects Team* gave a series of seminars on the strategic importance of workforce planning, ranging from an introduction to staff in trusts, PCTs and SHAs who were new to the remit, to a more detailed brief for those already working at an operational level within those organisations.
The overall theme was that organisations should not view WTD in isolation, but as part of an integrated approach to workforce planning, which takes account of the wider local and national policy drivers.
Delegates heard that WTD can be used as a catalyst for change to make a difference to how and where patient care is delivered. Organisations that can create a flexible, affordable workforce that can react to the changes in the NHS would be more productive and best placed to deliver the quality healthcare highlighted in the recent Darzi report.
The sessions demonstrated a number of practical workforce planning tools including benchmarking databases suitable for PCTs, acute and mental health trusts, the assessing workforce supply tool and a WTD rota database.
Also on show at the exhibition was a demonstration of how a diagnostic assessment approach can help trusts towards compliance.
The Workforce Programmes Team from NHS East of England, which is currently providing two levels of targeted support to trusts, described the ways in which such an assessment tool can be used. It also highlighted the value of new and extended roles in achieving WTD. Workforce consultant Boyd Mullins said the diagnostic assessment had been successfully implemented in 15 trusts, with another 35 to be completed in the next 12 months.
He said there was an immediate impact on the profile of WTD with an increase in compliance of almost four times the national average. “We have found WTD is working well where it is linked to other initiatives, such as Hospital at Night,” he said. “It is not working so well in trusts where it has been treated as a separate issue.”
He explained that some trusts had focused solely on the solution of employing more doctors rather than looking at a wider service redesign.
“While we do not discourage trusts from increasing the number of doctors if that is appropriate for their organisation, we encourage them to look also at possible wider changes.
“Similarly the responsibility for WTD needs to be spread across the organisation rather than be just that of the medical directors.”
He listed the 10 key enablers to support trusts to achieve compliance as leadership commitment, management of change, rota design, new ways of working, training and development as well as technological solutions, service redesign, workforce planning, finance and communications.
Working Time Directive 2009 
