1. Workforce Transformation Kirstie Baxter Head of Workforce Transformation
January 2014

2. And it got me thinking about other epic challenges…
Debra Searle, British adventurer, who in 2002 rowed single handedly across the Atlantic – 3,000 miles in a race from Tenerife to Barbados in a self made plywood boat!
Never having rowed before, it took her 111 days at sea, filled with set backs, such as forceful trade winds, desperate loneliness and terrors – not least, one 300,000 ton Super tanker which almost ran her down and brought an end to her dream.
But with her goal clear in her heart, constant vigilance and her lifelines; the solar panels on her boat giving her the electricity to make water and her satellite phone keeping her sane – she finally made the lone voyage successfully.
And listening to her speak – her tactics and strategies to keep going were twofold;
1) Reminding herself of her goal, what she was up against and practically, what was her toolkit for each day to survive and progress
2) Creating positive images and stories of what success would look like when she reached her final destination

3. The NHS belongs to the people
It is there to improve our health and wellbeing, supporting us to keep mentally and physically well, to get better when we are ill and, when we cannot fully recover, to stay as well as we can to the end of our lives.
It works at the limits of science – bringing the highest levels of human knowledge and skill to save lives and improve health.
It touches our lives at times of basic human need, when care and compassion are what matter most.
And so I started to reflect on our goal – this being about people, keeping them as well as is possible, for as long as is possible and that if and when care is needed, it is delivered by the right people, with the right skills values and behaviours at the right time and place.

4. Our Supertanker! Population challenges Clinical challenges
Financial challenges
And then to what we are up against, our Super Tanker – better known in the NHS as ‘the burning platform’! …
We have a growing population, which over the past 10 years has grown by 4.2% and which is expected to grow by 4.4% over the next decade, from 7 to 7.4m
We have a significant variance in life expectancy, with the highest in East Cheshire at 80 and the lowest in Blackpool at 73
We have a population which is ageing at a rate of 0.3% each year, which may not seem like a lot, but when you consider that is a growth from 16% of the population being aged 65+ in 2001, by the time many of us in this room are in need of health services, it’s likely to be in the region of 25-30%
And of course, we have our modern lifestyles – the guilty pleasures for some of drinking, smoking, and macdonalds!
And then the clinical challenges..
Getting access to a GP when you need one – apologies to the GPs in the room, but we’ve all been there!
More people using their local A&E, with a growth just short of 6% in the past 4 years
And of course, the increase in people living with multiple long-term conditions – diabetes, asthma, heart disease
And then the financial challenges…
Looking after the NW population costs a lot of money – 95.6 billion nationally to deliver the NHS England Mandate, circa 15% of which comes the NW (14.3b)
And these days you get less for your buck – advancing technology and treating patients in hospital is simply more expensive

5. HENW’s toolkit Workforce Strategy Stakeholder Engagement & OD
Modernisation Hub
Education Commissioning
Primary Care
Centre for Professional Workforce Development
Public Health
Education Management
Postgraduate Medical & Dental Function
And so we know our goal and we know what we’re up against – but do we know what’s in our toolkit, what we practically need to do to progress?
The LETBs role of course is to help improve the quality of health and healthcare, by ensuring the workforce has the right numbers, with the right skills, values and behaviours, at the right time and place.
And fortunately, HENW is not only the largest LETB, but also one of the best! Alongside the NW’s fame for football, music and soap opera’s, the NW is particularly recognised for its’;
Clinical Professional Networks
Its’ investment in the public health workforce
Its’ progressive postgraduate medical and dental functions
And of course, its’ apprenticeship strategy – to name just a few
But if I were to be super critical, certainly in some cases, we perhaps haven’t always been as collaborative with our endeavours or our successes as we could be – you could say, we have been lone voyagers at sea. All with our toolkits, strategies and successes, but independent of each other. Like the broader health and social care system, littered with small pockets of excellence, often not acknowledged, celebrated or shared. The net effect being that without scale, we risk little overall impact.

6. Regional scale Integrated Care Integrated Care
Centre for Professional Workforce Development
Public Health
Education Commissioning
Workforce Strategy
Education Management
Modernisation Hub
Postgraduate Medical & Dental Function
Primary Care
Stakeholder Engagement & OD
Pre-Birth
Death
Living Well
Healthy Population
Community & Social Care
Primary Care
Secondary Care
Tertiary Care
Integrated Care
Integrated Care
And so to boost our scale and boost our impact, we’re bringing these functions together into a single regional team with oversight of all things workforce transformation.
A team which working through both its’ directly funded activities, as well as those which are not, will be strategically positioned and locally responsive to progress.
Education & Learning Infrastructure

7. Next Steps A single whole system workforce planning tool
The roll out of the primary care data capture
A common narrative for Health and Wellbeing Boards
Begin sharing our stories!
And so to Debra Searle’s second strategy…..creating the positive images and stories.
Our first step is to understand what the health and social care workforce looks like now and to this end, we are planning the development of a single workforce planning tool, to capture the whole system data we need to focus our investment.
We are also rolling out the new primary care data capture tool, to begin informing service commissioning plans from March this year
And we’re developing a common narrative to share with Health and Wellbeing Boards in their Better Care Fund bids.
But today, with all of you here – we want to start sharing those little pockets of excellence that we know are out there, those stories of workforce transformation in action, so we can build up the positive image of success – an image which we can share.
I think it was JFK who said ‘ effort and courage are not enough without purpose and direction’ and by the end of this morning, we should have oodles of both!