Workforce

BCPC System Lead: Allan Duffell (RWT/WHT), Project Manager: Aradhika Heer (RWT)

The Black Country Provider Collaborative’s workforce portfolio has been focused on the following three key priority areas.

Supporting easier staff movement

The focus of this priority is centred around reducing barriers to the movement of staff across the system by creating a more seamless process to support the BCPCs vision of working as ‘One hospital system’.

Throughout 22-23 we have worked with key staff across all four organisations to explore the challenges for staff moving across the system which has enhanced our understanding of what should and could be practically done to minimise this.

The work in this area has highlighted many existing and some historic barriers such as IT logins, car parking and ID card access in addition to some routine things such as the transfer of mandatory training status.

There is currently a fully functional MOU in place, which aids and supports the movement of staff between organisations within our system as an interim arrangement whilst more long-term solutions are being developed. This has proven to be a success and is currently working well between organisations.

Early success has seen the harmonisation of all four organisations onto the NHS Mail system, with Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust migrating to align with the partner organisations.

Looking ahead, significant effort is being made to work with Estates colleagues to understand the ‘art of the possible’ in navigating the challenges to accessing car parking and single ID for all staff to freely move and work across the multiple sites of the BCPC.

Reducing vacancies

There has been a great level of positive engagement and willingness to collaborate from teams across each Provider, particularly from HRDs, Deputy HRDs and HR teams, which has led to other workstreams being explored such as understanding the resourcing needs across all providers and gaining a clearer picture of where the hard to fill areas sit.

Resourcing colleagues from all four Trusts have contributed to completing a report which helped identify hot spot areas clearly highlighting where our greatest challenges are across the system. This has been a great example of collaborative working across the system and to strengthen this furthermore, it has allowed for the Allied Health Professions (AHP) International recruitment initiative to be progressed which is now seeing positive outcomes.

The AHP international recruitment initiative has focussed on sourcing candidates within the AHP staff group, with a particular initial focus on radiographers, podiatrists, and occupational therapists.

The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust has been identified as the lead employer for this recruitment initiative and a working group has been making progress with meeting the demands of this workstream. Some of the success which have been achieved are illustrated through the following:

  • Nursing fellowship programme – target of 473 all of which have been recruited, and 479 have arrived.
  • Midwives – target of 78 of which all have been recruited and 78 have arrived.
  • Diagnostic radiographers – target of 15, 10 recruited and 10 have arrived.
  • Podiatrists and Occupational Therapists – target of 22, of which 12 OT’s and four podiatrists have been recruited with expected arrivals due to be confirmed shortly.

Aligning workforce processes and systems

To support the four partners in working as ‘one hospital system’, a key focus of our work has been centred on aligning our workforce processes and systems, enabling a reduction in variance leading to greater equality, benefits, and fairness for both providers and employees.

Active engagement of the Human Resource Directors (HRDs) has been key with a productive away day conducted to develop a workforce programme of work for the BCPC alongside identifying focused areas of interest for progression, resulting in the identification of the following:

  • Alignment of job roles
  • Reviewing the medical staffing and recruitment functions for potential alignment
  • Policy alignment
  • Bank rate alignment.

Working groups have been established with leads from all four partners to progress work in these areas with an early output being an agreement on an initial approach to Bank rates for some A4C banded roles, with more to follow.

Furthermore, to support the alignment of HR process across the partners, it was deemed essential that there be some concerted effort to align ESR systems and processes as a foundation for future work in this space. The BCPC approved a 12-month appointment of an ESR Project Lead, which was successfully appointed to, and recently commenced. Their agreed initial objectives which are:

  • Employee self-service
  • Data Quality

Along with the above two priorities, other areas are also being explored which include:

  • Move to common aligned coding across all four Trusts.
  • Establish consistent standardised workforce reporting.
  • Fully utilise and standardise the IAT process across all four Trusts.

Progress is being monitored and managed on a monthly basis through reports provided by the BCPC Workforce Lead.

Looking Ahead

As the transformative efforts of the Clinical Improvement Programme continue to progress it is evident that the workforce workstream will begin to play an even greater role in enabling the new models of care to be delivered.

It will become imperative to move faster across all three of the priority areas identified, with the work undertaken in 22-23 a strong foundation from which to proceed.

In particular, it is anticipated we will focus on some of the following:

  • Aligned processes and systems through investigating and identifying options for an aligned common use of ESR and improved data quality.
  • Reviewing and identifying policies and procedures, with a view for opportunities to align them across the system.
  • To continue building on the success of International Recruitment and using this for other staff groups.
  • Exploring options for consolidating the mandatory training provision which would involve one provider being the lead for this throughout the BCPC.