WRaPT have provided support to the Greater Manchester Health and Social Care Partnership and Health Education England North West to help inform, engage, analyse and co-create the pan-GM 5 year workforce strategy for health and social care, plus support the 10 constituent localities’ individual workforce planning approaches, in service of the ‘Devo Manc’ devolution programme for workforce.
Background
Greater Manchester is taking control of public funding for health and social care, and redesigning its care models to better meet the needs of its population. In support of the care redesign, there are a range of support workstreams, including workforce.
The Greater Manchester Health & Social Care economy needed to be able to create a clear narrative around the current and projected future workforce, at both a pan-GM and individual locality level. This was in service of the creation of a pan-GM 5 year workforce strategy and 1 year implementation plan, bringing all this information together into a coherent and compelling cross-economy plan to tackle the key workforce issues for Greater Manchester.
Originally there was no clear narrative or no single version of the ‘truth’ regarding workforce numbers and no consistency between the planning approaches taken by the individual localities. As there were multiple sources for both current and projected workforce numbers, there was a risk that a confused picture would emerge – and that any attempt to be authoritative on the numbers will be undermined by the existence of unexplained differences in data sources.
Localities weren’t consistently sighted on each others’ approaches and so opportunities for learning, cross-fertilisation of ideas and potential economies of scale for specific initiatives were being lost.
Any pan-GM strategy would come under intense scrutiny given the importance of the Devo Manc agenda and so needed to be robustly evidenced and constructed with the utmost diligence and commitment to quality and clarity.
GE via the WRaPT service (LCFT/GE/HEE in partnership forming the Workforce Repository and Planning Team – ‘WRaPT’) were commissioned to provide the additional capability and capacity needed to support delivery of a successful pan-GM strategy at pace, over the first half of 2017.
WRaPT’s involvement
We provided workforce plan review and challenge assistance to each locality and ran a series of joint workshops to share plans, gain access to good practice approaches and further develop their strategies, whilst two localities received intensive help in investment planning and workforce planning of neighbourhood teams. We mined relevant data sources and conducted various analyses to establish a coherent and consistent baseline and 5 years forward workforce picture and commissioned additional workforce futures reports to inform the forecasting across sector. Finally, we worked as part of the GM Workforce team to bring all this information together and contributed to the development of the pan-GM strategy and documentation.
Results
The GM Workforce Strategy has since been approved by the Strategic Programme Board and published. We later helped shape the GM Workforce Collaborative that has emerged as the primary delivery vehicle for the GM Workforce Strategy and now sit on that are core members, representing the WRaPT partnership.
