Phase 3: Bridging The Gap
Defining a range of workforce initiatives to ‘bridge the gap’ between current state and your future requirements, and determining how these initiatives will be brought to life in the coming years
Key Focus Area 1: Engagement with the Workforce
Actively engage with your workforce, including clinical practitioners and non-clinical staff, to gather their input and ideas. Design workforce initiatives that address forecast workforce gaps, attract new talent, and retain existing staff.
Key Focus Area 2: Provide a Clear Action Plan
Provide HHS leaders, including clinical and non-clinical professional and service leads, with a clear, actionable plan to ensure initiatives are effective and sustainable. This includes:
- establishing a roadmap
- governance structures
- key KPIs or success measures.
By focusing on this area, you will ensure that your workforce initiatives are inclusive, well-structured, accountable, and aligned with the organisation’s strategic goals
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After completing this phase, you will have:
A Comprehensive Workforce Strategy: Develop a workforce strategy with a 5–10-year timeframe that outlines the health service organisation’s workforce priorities and their strategic origins.
Clear Objectives and Strategies: Identify the objectives and strategies to be pursued in each workforce priority area, ensuring they are aligned with the organisation's long-term goals.
Specified Outcomes and Performance Measures: Specify the outcomes to be achieved and the performance measures that will be applied to track progress and ensure accountability.
Detailed Action Plans: Create action plans linked to each of the strategies, with clear accountabilities, time frames, and measures to ensure effective implementation and monitoring.
By focusing on these outcomes, you will ensure that your workforce strategy is robust, actionable, and aligned with the organisation’s strategic and service priorities.
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Activities to Consider:
- Review Workforce Characteristics: Review the workforce characteristics described in the gap analysis from phase 2. Organise these into workforce priority areas that are clearly linked to organisational and system priorities.
- Formulate Objectives and Strategies: Formulate objectives and strategy options to close the gaps. Evaluate the strategies in terms of feasibility, risk, resourcing, and likely efficacy in supporting the achievement of the organisation’s priorities. Desired outcome and develop performance measures that may be used to assess the outcomes.
- Develop Roadmap: Prioritise the workforce initiatives and define the key steps that must be taken to bring them to life.
- Engage and Support the Business: Engage and support the business to develop action plans to operationalise each of the strategies.
- Identify Measurables: For each workforce initiative, define one or more Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or success measures.
- Implement and Monitor Action Plans: Implement the action plans, monitor progress, and periodically evaluate the effectiveness of the strategies against the established performance measures. Implement required changes in subsequent planning cycles.
- Adjust Actions and Review Priorities: Adjust actions where required and continually review priorities, strategies, and actions to ensure that they are appropriate and relevant to the health service’s evolving priorities.
By focusing on these activities, you will ensure that your workforce strategy is comprehensive, actionable, and aligned with the organisation’s strategic and service priorities.