SY Workforce Hub Quarterly Highlights Report (April - June 24)
NHS HR Futures
South Yorkshire completed its 2024/25 workforce planning submission as required and on schedule, encompassing all relevant workforce components. Engagement of Chief People Officers and Deputy CPOs was integral to this work, as well as ongoing networking and liaison with other key stakeholders including Chief Finance Officers and the broader SY ICB Operational Planning Delivery and Leadership groups. We await final NHS England feedback on our workforce planning submission.
Following the collaborations to procure the medical eWorkforce systems and pricing negotiations for the Agenda for Change eWorkforce systems we have utilised our combined scale and also captured a great deal of learning which will inform future collaborative activities. We are now conducting an assessment of all current eWorkforce systems across our Provider Trusts to help develop a road map of opportunities leading to a People Digital Strategy. We also aim to work with our stakeholder groups and communities of practice to improve the optimisation of common key eWorkforce systems.
The data shows, with few exceptions, month on month reduction in both demand and cost of our temporary workforce and this is a credit to the initiatives and work completed by colleagues across all Trusts. Initiatives have included workforce optimisation improvements, increased checks and controls and negotiating reduction in agency costs. The collective work to design, introduce and operate the Non-clinical Agency Assurance Framework has also delivered impressive results by reducing non-clinical agency use to a minimum across SY in such a short timescale.
The stakeholder groups and communities of practice are focussed on further improvements and also using the learning taken from all the initiatives to date to seek similar improvement across other workforce groups.
SY recruitment leads continue to progress a number of priority workstreams, including a Time to Hire improvement project, which is currently focussing on sharing/upscaling good practice in vacancy control processes, as well as engagement with recruiting managers to gain insight on broader challenges outside of the HR/recruitment team. In addition, a SY inclusive recruitment group has been established to progress shared high-impact actions as framed by NHS England’s EDI Improvement Plan.
South Yorkshire remains the forerunner ICS for rollout of the national Digital Staff Passport. This quarter, 2 further SY Trusts have commenced the issuing of passports (SCH and TRFT) joining the existing Wave 1 Trusts (DBTH and STH). Plans are in place for all remaining SY Trusts to actively commence with DSP over the coming months. Due to the nationally-set parameters and timeline for rollout, it is not possible for DSP to meet all of South Yorkshire’s staff movement needs at present or in the near future. As such, HRDs have provisionally agreed a new ‘one employer’ approach to pre-employment checks, to further streamline the movement of staff moving NHS-NHS. An MOU is in development for this purpose. South Yorkshire is also making good progress on NHS England’s recently refreshed reform programme for stat/mand training (MAST), with the SY MAST Governance Group coordinating in terms of compliance and reporting back to SY HRDs.
The South Yorkshire SPF continues to support positive and constructive partnership working with Trade Unions and has recently agreed to structure meeting agendas in line with 3 priorities as suggested by the national SPF: Improving Staff Experience; New Ways of Working; and EDI. The SY SPF has also aided regional response and Trade Union involvement on key issues such as menopause support and support for unpaid carers. A growing area of focus for partnership work is Job Evaluation, where plans are progressing for the piloting of ICS-level job matching, as well as the proposed joint procurement of a Job Evaluation e-Workforce system and an ICB-funded programme of job matching training to boost regional capacity.