Health and Social Care

Workforce Stuff Matters

July 21, 2015 by Linda White No Comments | Category Uncategorized

If you attended the recent 2015 NHSScotland Event in Glasgow you’ll have picked up on one of the themes – change happens.

The aim of our Parallel Session at the NHSScotland Event, “Workforce Stuff Matters”, was to help delegates to identify the workforce issues that really matter to people who use and deliver health and social care services regardless of who provides the service or where it is provided. It also helped identify the workforce challenges we have in common and can do better by working together.

Listening to members of staff and leaders talking about the challenges of delivering the future and treating others as you would want to be treated helps define the support that is needed at national and local level. We do this in partnership and with attention to good staff governance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFMHlI4i8Z0

Ensuring that patients and their families get the best healthcare possible from well trained and educated staff is key. Partnership working with NHS Education for Scotland, the Scottish Social Services Council and others is essential with growing involvement in education and training across the health and social care sector in Scotland. The investment in education and training is considerable as you would expect and the scope is wide and varied covering educational frameworks for support workers to programmes to develop future strategic clinical and non-clinical leaders in NHSScotland.

Strengthening the Links
Building relationships and providing the opportunity for conversations and shared practice is developing momentum in relation to the provision of integrated services. We have been “Strengthening the Links” with partners through a number of events bringing together the HR community across Health and Social Care.
Planning and resourcing the workforce is a common objective which challenges us all. We have made considerable progress over the last few years in building up workforce planning capacity and capability in NHSScotland. We have established methodologies in place and a growing intelligence about our workforce. There remains much to be done, but we’re on the right track.

We need to be good at this to ensure we have a sustainable workforce when the aspirations of those in our workforce are changing with different expectations around work-life balance, careers and carer responsibilities. It has never been more important to understand not just the numbers but the people in our workforce.

We are embedding a vision of an NHSScotland that not just continues to be an employer of choice but one that attracts the best people at the right time into a culture that inspires them to evolve, respond and grow. Change, it seems, also brings fantastic opportunity and we’re up for that.

Shirley Rogers is Director of Health Workforce, Health Workforce Directorate, Scottish Government.

The Workforce Directorate’s responsibilities include workforce sustainability, employee experience, new models of service, pay, terms and conditions of service, pensions, workforce planning, reshaping medical careers and the sponsorship of NHS Education for Scotland.

Tags: 2015, Health, Integration, NHSSCOT15, NHSScotland, Social Care, Workforce, Workforce Directorate

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