We worked with NHS Birmingham and Solihull Integrated Care Board (NHS BSOL ICB) to standardise turnover reporting, enhance workforce data accuracy, and provide essential workforce planning tools, ensuring a stronger foundation for long-term workforce strategy and decision-making.

Background

NHS Birmingham and Solihull ICB faced challenges with inconsistent turnover reporting and gaps in workforce data across trusts. These inconsistencies made it difficult to produce accurate workforce insights, affecting strategic planning, resource allocation, and decision-making.

Turnover rates were calculated differently across organisations, making comparisons unreliable. Essential workforce data such as recruitment sources, reasons for leaving, and career destinations were incomplete or inconsistently recorded. These gaps prevented the ICB from understanding workforce trends, forecasting future needs, and developing an effective long-term workforce strategy.

To support more accurate workforce planning and data consistency across trusts, our Peoples Services team partnered with the ICB to address these challenges and ensure a more structured, reliable workforce data system.

Action

We developed and delivered a structured project plan to address three key priorities:

1. Standardising turnover reporting: Establishing a consistent and transparent method for calculating turnover, ensuring that all trusts use the same approach to measure staff movement.
2. Improving workforce data completeness: Identifying gaps in key workforce data fields, supporting trusts in improving data quality, and developing guidance materials to standardise data collection processes.
3. Providing workforce planning tools: Creating an inventory of data tools to help trusts track trends, improve reporting, and forecast future workforce needs.

To implement these improvements, we first collected and analysed workforce data from across trusts using a user-friendly data collection template. This provided a baseline understanding of data quality and gaps.

We then worked collaboratively with stakeholders, hosting engagement sessions to review findings and discuss areas for improvement. These discussions allowed us to tailor solutions to the specific needs of each trust.

Impact

1. A unified turnover reporting method: We established a standardised turnover calculation, ensuring alignment with national best practices and making workforce data more reliable. This new approach will be fully implemented by April 2025.
2. More accurate staff data: We helped trusts improve key workforce data fields, such as recruitment sources, leaving reasons, and career destinations. Recognising the challenges of different self-service access levels across organisations, we developed communications and visual guides to help managers and administrators maintain consistent and complete records.
3. Improved workforce reporting capabilities: We developed a new pathway data collection template, addressing limitations in the ‘area of work’ field. This flexible tool enables trusts to track workforce pathways and career progression better.
4. Enhanced demographic data for workforce equity: Ensuring accurate demographic data is vital for equity and inclusion. We identified data gaps and partnered with equality, diversity and inclusion leads to launch targeted campaigns, supported by ready-made communication materials, including emails, intranet posts, and how-to guides, to help improve data collection and overcome potential stigma.
5. Delivery of workforce planning tools: We created an inventory of easy-to-use workforce planning tools, helping trusts access national workforce models, health trend data, supply insights, and future planning resources.

These improvements laid the groundwork for more consistent workforce data across trusts, enabling better workforce planning, trend analysis, and decision-making.

Feedback

Having worked closely with the NHS ML team, we believe they provided exceptional service to the ICB. They consistently provided update reports, kept communication open and engaged with programme of work very well.  They provided expert knowledge on the areas of work and have met all the outcomes initially set out in the requirements. Gurinder Banga | ICS Planning and Analytical Manager | NHS Birmingham and Solihull

For more information

For more information and to learn how we can help your organisation, please contact us.