Strategic Workforce Planning
SWiPe is a unique approach to supporting systems and organisations to develop a wider and deeper understanding of what their workforce will need to look like in the future to deliver the best outcomes for their population.
“The future of the NHS depends on having the right numbers of staff in the right roles, at the right times, and in the right locations.”
The Challenge
For many organisations – and systems – delivering health and social care, workforce planning is often done in isolation, and is seen as a necessary part of annual planning rounds. This approach is not sustainable.
What is SWiPe?
We have a unique approach to supporting systems and organisations to develop a wider and deeper understanding of what their workforce will need to look like in the future to deliver the best outcomes for their population.
We use SWiPe © (Strategic Workforce Planning) as a shorthand for the framework, which has the following distinctives:
It seeks to understand underlying population health needs, and how these will change over time and thus impact the services in question;
It seeks to understand service transformation, and how things will look different in the future so as to shape the workforce to support these changes in good time;
It works through the workforce transformation necessary to respond to these challenges.
How it works
The distinctives of SWiPe include the rooting of future workforce requirements in local population health needs, the identification of impact from service transformation and the use of a simulation tool to explore the ‘A’ to ‘B’ journey of workforce transformation.
A further distinctive of the SWiPe ® framework is the use of care functions and skill mix in shaping future requirements enabling stakeholders to be temporarily agnostic to organisational or professional boundaries when exploring future requirements.
Using population health as the starting point, and understanding the broad health status of a local population across four broad adult health segments, i.e. the healthy, those with single conditions, those with multiple and complex needs and those who are severely frail, we can create a workforce planning tool. This will estimate future workforce requirements using the initial workforce as a baseline, and a combination of demographic and health cohort changes over time, as well as service transformation to estimate how the workforce requirements will change across an entire system, or specialty, or service type such as mental health, community or acute services.