Robust workforce planning and regular review of strategy is crucial to ensure that sustainable imaging services can be provided in the future. A wide range of imaging focused health professionals will be needed to provide a high quality, efficient and responsive imaging service.
The increasing demands on imaging services need a modern workforce to deliver high quality, efficient and sustainable services. The workforce team are working on improving training to bring more staff into diagnostic radiology and to support existing staff through the training academy and strategic plans covering all key staff groups. The projects in NW London are linked with the wider London workforce strategic plan.
We know that the success of our services depends on the people who work within them. Ensuring that we have the enough trained, confident and happy staff is key to the growth and development of our services as we respond to changing requirements for imaging over the next few years.
By being forward thinking, creative, working collaboratively across our well established network and drawing on the experiences and success of others we will be working to increase our offering of more mobile, flexible, and interesting roles with abundant development opportunities. We will stabilise our current workforce by making ourselves the local employers of choice, and expand opportunities to find and train our workforce of the future from our local NW London communities with varied and supportive career pathways.
Reviewing resourcing as we change the settings in which we provide care as our Community Diagnostic Centres open during 2023/24 presents us huge opportunities to review how we work and learn and allows us to embrace the opportunities this change in model can bring.
- Collaborative working in the MRI hub at Ealing
- Development of NWL-wide reporting output metrics for workforce planning.
- Development of passporting process
- Roll out of insourced reporting model
- Apprentices and Assistant practitioners
- Staff passporting process agreed and in place
- NWL reporting output metrics now agreed and endorsed by the Royal College and published in national guidance
- Preceptorship support
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3. Maximising opportunities for flexible learning, working and retirement
4. Developing routes for our future workforce to join us
5. Using data and evidence to target our efforts at our biggest workforce challenges
1. Finalising our people strategy and workplan with the aim of being the local employers of choice, offering the best staff experience
We have a draft people strategy based on national, staff group and service specific and local priorities which includes 6 areas of work. The draft document will be completed and engagement and feedback will be sought from a wide range of staff across the network on whether we have identified the issues that are important to you. Several streams of work are identified as needing to be undertaken in each of the priority areas and have been split into short, medium and long term priorities. We would very much like team members to work with us to drive these programmes forward and understand whether we have these priorities right.
The six areas of focus in our draft strategy are:
Resourcing (growing our workforce)
Feeling valued (by your team, manager and organisation)
Flexible working (ensuring that we are learning from each other and using best practice across the network)
Wellbeing (Asking whether the offerings available meet our team members needs)
Growth, learning and development (ensuring that we are able to offer supportive learning environments and opportunities)
Diverse and inclusive leadership (supporting the growth and development of our leaders)
2. Ensuring that international recruitment pipelines are well established and supportive to grow our workforce
Each Trust has been exploring their own international recruitment, but we would have better economies of scale and be able to provide a supported programme if we work together, share expert resources (e.g. specialist international recruitment staff, pastoral care, housing etc) as well as having a coordinated approach to engaging in national programmes. This approach would allow staff to be recruited on a rolling programme, feeding into the workforce wherever they are most needed at the time of appointment across the sector without local managers and local recruitment and HRBusiness Partners having to undertake these programmes of work at each Trust.
3. Maximising opportunities for flexible learning, working and retirement
Our workforce is changing, we need to be able to change to adapt to modern ways of working whilst still meeting the needs of our patients. Being able to learn, work and retire flexibly leaves many doors open for our team members to stay with us and feel supported in their work without impacting other areas of their lives. Learning from each other and adopting best practice in these areas across the patch will contribute to us being the local employers of choice for imaging staff.
4. Developing routes for our future workforce to join us
Engaging our local communities to be enthused about working in healthcare and aware of the options available to them is key to growing a loyal and sustainable workforce for the future. Whether it’s ensuring that young people have the information they need to choose the career options and pathways that suit their needs, finding those who wanted a career in health where traditional qualification routes were not available to them, returning to the workforce after a break, qualified and practiced oversees or through a different route (e.g. military). All of these routes (and more) need to be set up locally with community partners.
Investing in these alternative routes into the workplace and not relying on a university based pipeline (that whilst increasing is not going to be able to meet the national growth need) will need a financial and time commitment from our services and existing workforce. These entry routes and training do not tend to be funded at the level services need to be able to invest in. Consequently, to be able to create the routes for this crucial workforce, creativity and / or further business cases and externally funded projects along with time for practice education, buddying, engagement in community events and mentoring all need to be built into our workforce modelling.
5. Using data and evidence to target our efforts at our biggest workforce challenges
Using data from Trusts, the network, London, national and public health data we are able to map our existing workforce against current service provision needs and predict the service (and therefore workforce needs) of the future. Being able to have short, medium and long term plans in place that correspond with these growth patterns with predicted training timelines will eventually ensure that we have pipelines of staff in place with associated plans to ensure that we are able to provide the workforce we need to run services at the level to meet patients needs. Currently we can see the shortages in certain staff groups across the network having an impact on our ability to provide service and perform at the required level, which inevitably will impact access to services and care. We are therefore able to prioritise planning and resourcing of these posts across the network to ease pressure locally for each Trust.