For 20 years, WSP has worked with clients across health, care and beyond to support and transform.
Our Work
Recent Client Stories
Here is a snapshot of our recent work and how WSP has supported insight and change across a range of different systems and organisations.
The People Planning Team at the Trust wanted to move away from the short-term reactive response to workforce arrangements that had become the norm and adopt a strategic approach to workforce planning to enable them to be better prepared for integrated working, and the increasing recruitment challenges.
Working with their People Planning Team, and clinical and operational leads, we developed an approach that enabled a sound understanding of vacancy levels, underlying population health drivers, the impact of technical advances / efficiencies and the anticipated changes from integrated working arrangements. This enabled operations to consider the functions that would need to be delivered by specialties and the skills that would be required. This baseline was then used to look at the recruitment across a five year period for existing and new roles. The data was used to develop a analytical tool that will be updated by the local analysts going forward.
As part of the work programme for the newly formed ICS it was agreed that all the partners across the system would come together to embed a strategic workforce planning approach to align the workforce skills and capacity to meet the ICS goals to deliver better outcomes for their population.
WSP worked in partnership with Skills for Care to deliver this programme, focusing initially on a diagnostic evaluation that highlighted the gaps in the system’s understanding of future workforce capacity and capability requirements. The same diagnostic evaluation identified the need to build trust and understanding across all parts of the system – particularly around workforce.
There was real enthusiasm amongst system partners. Stroke, Mental Health, Cancer & Diagnostics, and Young People’s services were identified to apply the fundamental principles of strategic workforce planning as part of pathway changes in the way services are delivered.
Bath, North East Somerset and South Gloucestershire had some of the worst delayed transfers of care in England. These delays were having a significant detrimental effect on the U&EC pathway. They required a strategic discharge model that enabled them to develop insights about capacity requirement in the context of recovery and transformation.
As part of a co-design process, we developed a system dynamics model of their acute admission and discharges across the ICB, helping them to understand the impacts of their investment in the Discharge to Assess (D2A) programme. It brought together all partners in its development, including local authorities, and enabled them to see in one model the impacts of recovery change, and the ongoing need for transformation of each service. The model was handed over to the system’s intelligence teams who were able to use it to monitor performance and system recovery over time.
Our Strategic Workforce Planning framework (SWiPe) formed the basis for a comprehensive process of system engagement across the North East & North Cumbria ICS during the latter part of 2019. Over 150 people were involved and workforce data from across primary, community, acute and social care sectors was combined to provide insight into the key challenges and opportunities associated with embedding strategic workforce planning into the wider ICS planning goals.
This project has now received a Highly Commended award at the 2020 HPMA Excellence in People ceremony, of which WSP are immensely proud.
Hospice UK partnered with WSP to evaluate their Extending Frailty Care programme, which began in late 2022 and is set to conclude in Autumn 2024. The evaluation framework was co-developed with input from experts and applied across eleven projects.
Eleven pilot sites across England and Scotland were funded to create innovative approaches to support people with advancing frailty, aiming to improve their quality of life and end-of-life experience. Projects engaged care homes, community services, and home care providers, with one project supporting a prison population and another embedded in a virtual ward.
WSP’s evaluation revealed clear challenges but also significant benefits in expanding frailty services. The projects contributed valuable learning for partners beyond the hospice sector and raised the profile of frailty services within hospices. Hospice UK is now exploring how to build on this programme with partners such as ICBs, Local Authorities, and the Care Sector.