The Great Digital Healthcare Workforce Challenge

Across Midlands Partnership NHS Foundation Trust we are not unique in our position of facing a workforce challenge. This is well advertised nationally about health and social care skills, but it's also true of digital roles too. We need digital staff that have the skills, experience and values to deliver our?Trust's Digital Strategy ?and services to our service users and carers.?

MPFT are primarily based in Staffordshire and Shropshire. We're not London, we're not even Birmingham, so how do we attract and retain the right people to enhance care in our region? This is the Great Digital Healthcare Workforce Challenge.

Capacity and Demand

Ever since the COVID outbreak in March 2020 we've all been going at 100 miles per hour. And of course I'm biased, but I do think digital have had to be one of the primary teams to not just respond to the initial pandemic, but to maintain the pace of outcomes too.?

COVID spawned an audacious amount of digital transformation. Systems were implemented and adopted overnight and this level of big bang digitisation had a profound effect on our workforce. Suddenly everything needed something digital (not that this wasn't always the case in the last decade!) But the demand on digital teams was - and remains -?huge. Put that into an NHS Healthcare context and we're in desperate need of staff that don't just understand digital, but understand health and care systems, processes, services, environments and service users too.?

It's a pretty unique set of skills and a pretty unique individual that is able to join a team already delivering at a frantic pace. We're looking for people that are up for the challenge, aware of the demand whilst also able to make the time to learn the ropes, grow in confidence and join the delivery of the ever growing digital transformation list. How can we make this situation a more exciting and appealing prospect? If our demand is huge and our capacity is struggling with workforce issues, how do we get existing employees and prospective employees to see this as an opportunity to get involved rather than turning and running in the other direction?

Structure

First and foremost it does come down to structure. Do we have the right roles with the right skills, with the adequate capacity and authority to prioritise workloads to create a truly collaborative, organised, low-stress, highly organised and rewarding workplace environment? Nobody likes perpetually jumping from one unplanned crisis to the next. It's stressful and feels like you're never in control. If our governance and our team structures are flawed, the sources of stressors can quickly mount, everyone can feel in the firing line of the ever growing demands and everything soon becomes a priority so that in effect, nothing is.?

When looking to attract staff, make sure that the Job Descriptions for the roles being advertised actually make sense. Make sure that the Personal Specification leaves room for people to gain the health and care experience required if necessary. Make sure that the wider team structure is decipherable; that the team actually makes sense and it's clear where each role fits and how each role contributes to the team as a whole and the overall objectives of the Trust.?

Diversity

I'm white. I'm male. I'm middle aged. I'm middle class. I'm in a position of seniority. This isn't a great look for championing diversity in 2023, I get that. And whilst I can't change who I am, I can change what I do. We need more diversity, we need a wider array of lived experiences and backgrounds to collaborate and contribute to the team ethos, to the way we co-design and prioritise work and the way we design and deliver our services too. This array of perspectives is essential to ensure we offer truly inclusive opportunities for people, but also to ensure the services we design and provide are truly inclusive too.?

There are very few people that set out to discriminate deliberately, and in our workforce I'm happy that we're employing an increasingly diverse team to contribute to our journey. Nobody should be put at an advantage or disadvantage just because of their gender, ethnicity, religious beliefs, age, sexuality or any other characteristic that we may be used to discriminate.?The diverse workforce challenge isn't going to change overnight, and it all stems back to having equitable opportunities from childhood through to your career.?

As a health and care digital employer what we can do is ensure we present equal opportunities and we don't look to employ in our own mould. I'm encouraging any person with the right skills and values and shared ambitions to apply for our positions. If we lean into remote working, flexible working and international recruitment, we stand an ever great chance of diversifying and enhancing our workforce. We can cast our recruitment net much farther and wider than ever before. Being primarily based in Staffordshire and Shropshire is no longer a barrier. We don't need to be London based to attract the best. Many digital roles enable this flexibility, so lean into it, embrace it and update the perceptions of our recruitment practices.?

Our most important practice as a prospective employer is to recognise it's a two way decision. We need to be advertising how flexible, inclusive and passionate we are. How ongoing communications and team interaction and dedication should be demonstrable?both locally and nationally (via social media, events) for all prospective employees to easily see and want to become a part of. Education does a great job of making their schools look as appealing as possible for local parents to pick their institution, in the NHS we need to do the same.

Skills and Experience

Not everybody that applies for new roles needs to be a ready made digital health expert right? So let's get that one cleared up. The police don't mandate that all applicants need to have arrested at least one person before applying for an entry police role to demonstrate experience, so why are we too often caught up looking for specific systems experience and health and care workplace experience for digital roles? The answer is pressure.?

With capacity low and demand?really?high we can often feel that we just can't afford the time to train new staff in the vital systems and processes and experiences that we simply need them to have from day one right??Wrong.?

Our structures and our governance need to protect capacity for the essential activity for new employees and existing employees to have sufficient time for work-based learning, training, service engagement and teamwork. We need to prioritise better, we can't deliver everything. So we need to stop deferring essential practices of robust inductions, ongoing mentoring and supervision and 1-1s, time for team meetings, time for service visits and engagement. If we're not trying to deliver everything, we'll make the capacity for this.?

With more pragmatic and ruthless prioritisation we can still ensure that we can offer people with the right?values?and?skillsets?the time needed to gain the required health and care experience.?

If employees never have space to learn and gain experience, we'll never truly have the confidence in the role to deliver to the best of our ability or the awareness of the services we're trying to deliver for.?

Experience, training and learning are essential for...

Retention

I've already mentioned burn-out. But it's true. If we did happen to find that new person with the right systems knowledge and adequate health and social care experience they're likely to be thrown right into the deep end right? "You know all this already? Great, now do it for us!"?

This is just wrong.?

A lack of pastoral care, engagement and on the job experience and training is contributing to high attrition rates and increasing sickness rates. We need to find that balance. Even individuals with amazing experience still need the support, time and space to get to know the team, to learn the unique Trust they find themselves positioned within and the new environments and localities.

And what about the wider team experience??

If you're unique in providing new staff the required time and space to learn and grow what about everyone else? Are they available to chat things through and collaborate with your new staff? Or are the remainder of your team all too maxed out themselves? If new employees find themselves?remote working ?and part of a wider team that are all too busy to collaborate, they're likely to soon feel pretty isolated and want to find somewhere with a stronger team-work culture.?

Retaining staff is so much more than just throwing adequate training courses and career opportunities under people's noses. We need to build a commitment to lifelong learning, a commitment to the team working as a collective, a commitment to success and enjoyment and a commitment to improving health and care.?

What are your staff passionate about?

Many digital staff are passionate about?digital?but perhaps not so passionate about?health and care. These are the staff that are most likely enticed away to private sector digital jobs on better salaries with "more appealing" reward packages.?

Our new banding model is almost encouraging staff to jump around to get those incremental pay increases that used to be in place on the old pay band model. So getting that collective passion in place can be a "silver bullet" for retention.?

If we create the space and time, we create the culture and we build a diverse team of people that are truly passionate about the sector they work within. We need staff that live and breathe the shared ambition to improve health and care with their digital skills. When the passion aligns to improving health and care, the risks of losing digital staff to other sectors reduce significantly.

And what about the wider non-digital health and care workforce? The more successful our digital teams are, the more of a positive impact we can have to improve the experience of the non-digital workforce. The digital systems capability can be a key driver for the recruitment and retention of our wider workforce too. But that's another blog altogether.?

The Great Digital Healthcare Workforce Challenge

I'm on a discussion panel for this very topic at HETT north in March. Whilst I may not have all the answers, I'm passionate, motivated, aware and trying my best. And that's a start.?

Take a look here to learn more:

Agenda - HETT North

And register your attendance here:

Pricing and Registration | HETT Show | September 2021 (hettnorth.co.uk)

Read more about our Digital Team in our Digital Strategy here:

Delivering Digital Transformation :: Midlands Partnership Foundation Trust (mpft.nhs.uk)

#workforcemanagement #workforce #NHS #people #diversity #recruitment #retention #leadership #HETT