South East London (SEL) Integrated Care System has recently published its People Strategy, which sets out the ICS’s vision of a skilled and supported ‘one workforce’ that feels “empowered and encouraged to collaborate” across partnerships.
The strategy is designed to support the delivery of the five ICS priorities: prevention and wellbeing; early years; children and young people mental health; adult MH and primary care, and people with long term conditions.
In addition, the ICS highlights five inter-connected priorities that will “set the foundation” for their delivery plan going forward. The first is strategic workforce planning, which will involve growing the workforce and ensuring evidence-based decision making to support investment in workforce growth and transformation. They will measure success in this area through integrated workforce planning across health and care; delivering accurate data and analytics to continually drive investment and report of workforce supply risks.
The second priority area revolves around driving training and education, which will look to educate, train and develop people, manage talent and strategically plan education to address future workforce gaps and new ways of working. Success will be measured by ensuring the workforce has a development plan and opportunities to access multi-disciplinary training, as well as embedding integrated care within everyone’s career journey.
Promoting SEL as a “great place to work” is the third priority which will aim to create more jobs for local people to support broader social and economic development within the region, and to support recruitment and retention of staff. The strategy notes that success will be measured by the stabilisation of their integrated vacancy rate, with annual improvements set by profession and an increased number of staff being recruited from local communities.
The final priority named in the strategy is embedding a culture of inclusion and wellbeing, which refers to the ICS’s ambition to facilitate a positive, inclusive and compassionate workplace culture. They will look to support staff health and wellbeing, staff retention and generally create a positive working environment. In terms of measuring success in this area, the strategy will monitor the stabilisation of the integrated retention rate, hoping to see a two percent improvement by 2025. More broadly, the ICS will look to ensure their diverse population is represented at all levels.
The strategy goes on to outline the strategic actions for each of its five priority areas, which it states “will enable a coherent and co-ordinated approach to fulfil our commitments.”
Actions for strategic workforce planning will include developing a consistent methodology in collecting and reporting workforce data, alongside regional and national benchmarking; delivery of workforce intelligence to identify and address workforce gaps across primary care, acute care and social care and developing long-term skills based on planning supporting new roles.
The strategic actions for education and training will involve delivering against a “comprehensive, co-designed education strategy”; targeted action plans filtered by profession and multidisciplinary teams with a focus on national shortage professions; increasing accessibility to shared resources and working with educational institutions to expand training and placement opportunities.
For the ‘SEL as the best place to work’ priority, the ICS’s strategic actions includes ensuring promotion of SEL forms part of “a robust recruitment and retention strategy”; increased apprenticeships; actively supporting wider participation; and ensuring a strategic approach committed to levelling up.
To establish a culture of inclusion and wellbeing, the ICS will look to drive an inclusive talent management strategy with improved opportunities; promote health and care values through a social movement and staff networks; empower peoples’ voices and enhance the capability of staff networks and ultimately embed a culture of compassionate leadership across the ICS.
Finally, the ICS will seek to enable innovation by posting the use of new roles and new ways of working – focusing on utilising community based roles; supporting hybrid working across health and care; planning improvements to support prevention and population health, and forming new partnerships to create investment opportunities by working with external private sector organisations and charities.
The full strategy can be viewed here.
