Producing a North West wide Neonatal workforce baseline
Other
The North West Neonatal Operational Delivery Network (NWODN) commissioned the WRaPT team via Health Education England to produce a baseline report of the neonatal workforce capacity across the region.
The brief of the assignment was to analyse the structure and skill mix of the neonatal units / services (including the dedicated workforce that contributes to care within Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICU’s), Local Neonatal Units (LNU’s) and Special Care Baby Units (SCBU’s) with age profiles.
The aim of this to enable the network to understand their workforce challenges such as where staff shortages may occur in the future and whether the skill mix could be changed by introducing new and different ways of working
The Challenge
The scope of the work extended to all 18 provider organisations from across the region covering 21 sites in total.
The roles identified that were to be included in the baseline were: Nursing, Medical, dedicated Ancillary staff, Admin and Clerical roles and any Allied Health Professions contributing to neonatal activity. Additionally, Vacancy and Bank and Agency usage data was collated.
The baseline collection was deemed to be a challenge due to the number of organisations involved as well as requesting data for a small service that usually forms part of a bigger paediatric service.
Medical staff due to the way they operate, are not generally dedicated to the neonatal unit and only work a small number of hours for the service, therefore challenging to apportion time to cover of the units.
For both Vacancy and Bank and Agency data, recording varies between Trusts. Data for these types of information is not always held on a central recording system and there are some organisations that are unable to track the volume of these at a small service level, therefore trying to collate consistent data would be tricky.
In addition, identifying the correct IG contacts and getting sign off of the agreements can be time consuming and impact on timeframes.
Our Approach
The WRaPT team worked in conjunction with the ODN to host 3 webinar sessions for the provider organisations to introduce the project and the aims of the baseline data collection and the Information Governance process.Workforce teams, Service Managers and IG leads were invited to the webinar sessions and were given an opportunity to raise questions.
The data request encompassed organisational information such as the organisational structure as well as position data, for example job title, salary and WTE. In addition year of birth was requested to understand the age profile of the neonatal workforce.
The provider organisations were asked to sign off the agreements prior to submission of data to the WRaPT team.
Data when submitted by each provider was reviewed for any missing information and follow ups with each provider took place to address any gaps The data was then loaded into Tableau to produce charts / visualisations of the workforce.
The WRaPT team analysed each Trust’s data and aggregated this to present a system wide picture of the neonatal workforce at North West level. The analysis was also broken down by network level (GM, CM, L&SC) and at provider level.
The Outcome
The baseline report was completed and presented to the North West Neonatal Operational Delivery Network in October 2018.
The NWODN are to meet with HEE to highlight and progress focussed pieces of work following the baseline report review.
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