The Solution
Poor workforce planning can put patients’ lives at risk and be wasteful; understaffing can leave employees stressed, while overstaffing can endanger livelihoods if jobs aren’t available. To solve this, a scenario-based model was created that would permit much more informed long-term decision-making called the ‘Robust Workforce Planning Framework’ – nothing like it has ever been seen in healthcare before. The RWPF incorporates everything from near-inevitabilities to apparent imponderables. The objective was to combine accepted facts, reasonable assumptions, controllable parameters and intrinsic uncertainties.
Stakeholder engagement was central to the RWPF, as it’s imperative to arrive at a shared view of future challenges when formulating policies. Known as ‘horizon scanning’, this involves capturing and synthesising a broad array of expert opinions concerning the potential factors that should be taken into account. Horizon scanning is about learning from the past, i.e. what we know, and surveying the future, i.e. what we want to know – and led in the model’s second phase, scenario generation.
It’s not possible to predict long-term accurately, so scenarios are crucial. The aim is to envisage futures that are challenging but consistent, so we have to establish contexts and produce a range of plausible futures – including a ‘business as usual’ baseline. The first stages of developing the model revolved around mapping out relevant processes – these maps were then shared with stakeholders to keep that stakeholder buy-in to the modelling. One of the models used contained 15 separate influence diagrams, almost 1000 distinct variables and more than 900,000 items of data – and yet simulation of this took place within 10 seconds.