Health and care transformation: how to get workforce planning right

Even though workforce challenges in health and care have been talked about for years, they have been exacerbated over the last two years. As a result, leaders in the sector are reviewing their workforce plans to ensure there’ll be adequate staff to meet future demand.

Given the lack of data in the public domain, organisations have had to rely on broad service demand projections. Decision makers have lacked access to granular insights to make accurate workforce decisions across specialties and care settings. Results from a poll taken during our event also support this.

Clearly there is a need for accurate and actionable workforce insights. These will also be necessary for a transition towards Integrated Care Systems. Without knowing how much staff would be needed and where, organisations won’t be able to cater to health and care needs in their communities.

To help solve this, KPMG closely worked with the Northern Care Alliance (NCA) to develop a bespoke planning solution. The solution provides a consolidated view of workforce needs linked to activity and cost across care settings. The system-wide strategic workforce planning solution gives NCA leaders an estimate of workforce supply and demand and lets them account for changes in their service model.

The size and structure of the NCA made it important for organisational leaders to get a comprehensive view of its workforce for future planning. With more than 18,000 employees and over a billion pounds as operating budget, the organisation manages over 2000 beds across four care organisations. For a strategic approach, it was essential to have a bird’s-eye view as well as a granular view of staff and cost across all services.

The solution developed with the NCA delivers this on a single platform. Developed using the Microsoft technology stack, including Azure and PowerBI, it can pack, unpack and predict different aspects of the workforce using organisational data. As a result, decisions can be based on the diverse needs of different health and care systems.

The starting point was bringing together workforce metrics in context with activity across care settings (acute, diagnostics, etc.) and finance data. The solution has the ability to show the workforce gap based on the NCA’s baseline position and in appropriate detail to service future demand and analyse supply. To bridge the gap, upskilling, new ways of working and technologies are some key considerations.

We developed the solution through deep collaboration across teams – planning, operations, strategy and finance. We found there is inherent complexity in getting a largely accurate sense of evolving service needs and shifting workforce demand and supply. Disconnected systems and data streams may add to this complexity. However, figuring out the right data sets and sources delivers compounding benefits for decisions that matter in the long run.

To make transformation possible, you need a lot more insight beyond an overview of demand and supply across the organisation or system; there’s an acute need to identify the required number of experts in different specialisations in 5-10 years. Our solution is helping the NCA do that.

It can run multiple scenarios and helps leaders see the impact across the system on a single dashboard. Overall, insights from the tool can help answer several key questions. Would proposed workforce changes be affordable? Who is going to be impacted? If we ask a particular staff category to increase their responsibilities, how can we compensate them?

These insights can then help drive targeted decisions. For instance, you might see a greater need for hospital nursing in the future even as the supply for new nurses remains constrained. In such a scenario, you might assess impact and consider bridging the gap through different roles or new ways of working.

Beyond hiring insights and budgets, the tool also provides crucial insights for transformation. For instance, looking at future areas of service growth can help with planning for relevant skills for the future. You might find out that you won’t need as many skilled professionals in certain areas while other specialties might see a staff shortage. In such cases, you might consider retraining existing staff to prepare for new roles. The data and insights can also serve as a starting point for conversations with institutions for medical and nursing education to ensure adequate workforce supply in areas of high demand.

Ultimately, with a combination of data, technology and human insight, the aim is to give back control to the organisation or system to better address future workforce challenges.

To find out how our system-wide strategic workforce planning solution can help your organisation, feel free to reach out to Michael Allen or James Devine.