Our work with Derbyshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust has significantly strengthened workforce planning, supported planning for the expansion of new roles, enhanced leadership capabilities, and addressed critical workforce risks, resulting in a more sustainable and agile medical workforce equipped to meet the trust’s present and future demands.

Background

Derbyshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust launched a programme to create a plan for transforming its medical workforce. The goal of this programme was to develop a flexible and agile medical workforce and leadership team that supports the trust’s growth, provides excellent care to meet the current and future needs of the local population, and creates a great working environment for staff.

Action

To support a collaborative approach, our Organisational Development team established a medical workforce transformation oversight group, with senior leaders from across the trust. Their role was to set and oversee the delivery of the project objectives and develop clear outcome measures to demonstrate the impact and success of the project deliverables.

Our approach was highly collaborative with a strong focus on meaningful engagement and co-production, working in partnership with teams from medical leadership, Consultants and Specialty and Associate Specialist (SAS) doctors, people leadership, nursing, operations, administration, medical secretaries, and medical staffing.

The programme consisted of five key areas of focus:

• Medical workforce plan
• Medical leadership plan
• Governance and engagement
• Development and revalidation of the medical workforce
• Medical staffing and medical secretarial functions

The programme was divided into three phases:

1. Phase one: A diagnostic report assessing the current situation
2. Phase two: Development of a vision for the future
3. Phase three: Implementation of the transformation plan

Impact

From the outset, clear outcome measures were established, and baseline data was collected through workforce surveys and data analysis.

The phase one diagnostic report provided a detailed understanding of:

• Medical workforce composition
• Workforce data, metrics, hotspots, and risks
• Existing structures and governance arrangements including job planning, appraisal, rostering processes and systems
• Leadership capacity and capability
• Support systems for medical staffing and medical secretarial/administrative teams

The diagnostic report derived several recommendations which were taken forward to create a vision for the future and to inform the development of service-based workforce plans including the expansion of new roles and improvements to existing systems and processes.  To inform this work and help address the recommendations we delivered several activities including:​

• a workforce summit to address top organisational workforce risks & develop actions/mitigation plans at a service level
• a new roles workshop was facilitated to develop and implement plans for the growth of Physician Associates, Advanced Clinical Practitioners, Multi-Professional Responsible/ Approved Clinician and other new roles to support the optimisation of the medical workforce
• a business case seeking investment and infrastructure support for the expansion of trainee doctors​
• fully explored the opportunity for international recruitment of doctors to inform a whole trust approach​
• a facilitated visioning workshop bringing the leaders and members of the medical staffing and medical education teams together to develop a vision for how the two teams could work more collaboratively in the future.  We co-developed clear aims and ambitions and a transformation journey to enable greater collaboration and better alignment of resources to medical workforce priorities. 
• all of the above contributed to the development of a trust workforce plan focused on delivering a sustainable workforce for the future, including the medical workforce, meeting the needs of the growing organisation and delivering the Making Room for Dignity programme.

Feedback

Nicky has been valuable as an external consultant working with us on medical workforce transformation with a focus on transformation of medical HR expertise. It was evident from her insights that she has been able to use the length and depth of her experience.  She worked in partnership with another external medical consultant with medical management experience and this partnership working was also beneficial for our organisation. Nicky has been responsive and received positive feedback from a range of our staff members.​ Arun Chidambaram​ | Medical Director​

For more information

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