New ways of working
Innovation and best practice at the heart of workforce design
As a community of health and care providers we are firmly committed to designing a workforce which meet the needs of our patients, service users and populations whilst creating innovative jobs and working environments where our staff can thrive.
Workforce Planning and Design
As we know how health and care is being delivered is changing, and never more so than now. It is therefore vitally important that we have the right people, with the right skills, at the right time so that we can deliver effective and timely health and care services.
As health and care providers we are working together across Humber and North Yorkshire to design workforce plans that will deliver our current and new services. From understanding who we have today, to forecasting our workforce needs in the future, we aim to have firm plans in place to ensure that we can meet the needs of our population.
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To do this we work with a whole range of partners, including NHS England, Health Education England and of course our local schools, colleges and universities. In doing this we aim to provide occupational training and sustainable employment to people in our local labour markets. For our existing staff we aim to create internal career paths that will allow anybody with the determination and commitment to reach the true potential. This applies to all our staff, in all occupations, from our registered roles such as therapists, scientists, nurses and midwives through to our unregistered staff in care, administration and estates teams. Each of these roles, whether in a community, social care or hospital setting is crucial to the running of our services.
New Roles and New Ways of Working
In addition to the traditional roles that everyone thinks within health and care we are determined to look at creating new roles that deliver the new ways of delivering our services.
We aim to be innovative and create new roles that will both excite staff, for the new opportunities they present, but also assure our patients and service users that we will have the right person, with the right skills when they need them. To do this, in partnership with NHS England, Health Education England and our universities we are designing the corresponding training courses needed to bring these new roles online. These roles will allow us to work differently. For instance, we are creating opportunities for our:
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•Registered staff to move into advanced clinical practitioner and non-medical consultant roles to support our medical staff
•Our support workers to become unregistered advanced practitioners bridging the traditional support worker role and our registered nurse, midwife and therapist roles.
All of this takes time and planning. We are therefore strengthening our already effective partnerships with our educational partnerships even further to do this. We are making sure that workforce planning and role redesign (and redesign) are key consideration in our various service transformational programmes. And finally, we, as the Humber and North Yorkshire system, are ensuring we are key partners, and an influential voice, within health and care national workforce transformation networks.
Staff Retention
We want to create environments where our staff feel part of something great, and where they feel proud to do what they do and who they work for. Without our highly skilled, motivated staff and teams we cannot deliver our services. For these reasons alone staff retention is critical to the running of our health and care services and the satisfaction our staff get coming to work. However, we know that what makes one person want to stay working for us can be very different from what makes the next person want to stay with us. As such our approach to staff retention must be, and is, very diverse.
We know we must create working environments where staff feel part of a team, a community. We are therefore focusing on this through our leadership development programmes.
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We are looking at how staff engagement and staff voice helps to shape how our services are run and develop. We are creating innovative roles and career paths that help people reach their true potential. We are looking at how we can reduce the bureaucracy that can slow the movement of staff between roles and speeds up recruitment between providers who work alongside each other to deliver our health and care services.
In addition to this we aim to provide the best staff rewards we can. We want to provide the best staff benefits, discounts and offers to staff. We want to provide flexible working opportunities so they can balance their work and home responsibilities and achieve a healthy work:life balance, and this includes how we support them with any caring responsibilities they have.
A finally but arguably, but most importantly, within retention that we are focusing on are how we look after our staff and provide inclusive working environments. We offer a wide range of health and wellbeing support to those who need it to maintain their physical, psychological and financial wellbeing. We also offer great support on subjects such as menopause and mens health. Our commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion has led to the launch of numerous staff networks to provide community and the ability to influence our policies and services. We review the activity of our workforce demographics and approach to recruitment and promotions, to ensure fairness and equality of opportunity and therefore make working in health and care a satisfying and rewarding experience for all.