The workforce supply project at North East London NHS Foundation Trust

Our learning from the project

“We now have a better understanding of the make-up of our support workforce, how we can support them in their professional development and the talent pool they represent for the organisation. The project has enabled us to push forward and consolidate our AHP apprenticeship work and we now have a coherent pathway for our pipeline candidates and are recruiting a new substantive AHP apprenticeship lead. We hope we will be able to partially fill our workforce gaps through the 30 new AHP apprentices we will have by the end of this calendar year.

“Oludare has been instrumental through this project in offering peer support to our pipeline candidates through signposting them to our Leaders Empowered to Achieve their Potential (LEAP) programme. This programme has been put together by the ethnic minority network within the trust who undertook a scoping exercise of our support workforce and discovered that there was a self-reported high level of imposter syndrome amongst them. LEAP has been designed to assist our support workers by promoting education and career development opportunities to enable them to achieve their full potential and maximise their capability within the organisation. 

“The project has helped us further organise the various workstreams we have, which includes close to 1000 members of staff aligning to AHP professions. We have been able to focus on the number of students we can accept, as well as the number of apprenticeships and international recruitment opportunities we can offer.

“We have focused on AHP workforce growth and have plans in place to expand the numbers of practice education facilitators (PEF) within the organisation. We already have one PEF in post who leads on the coordination and support of AHP practice education, and we are looking to recruit two more. One will have a primary focus on apprenticeship placements and the other will focus on our newly registered workforce and our preceptorship programme.  

We are also recruiting to three new professional AHP leadership roles. We hope that these roles will improve connectivity and engagement between corporate AHP leadership structures and the locality to build relationships at grassroot levels.” 

The difference at North East London Foundation Trust following the project and how it helps the organisation

“This project has enabled us to raise the profile of our support worker workforce and has given them a voice within the organisation and across our integrated care system (ICS). Following our scoping exercises, we have been able to differentiate the two main sets of support workers we seem to have; those who are looking into career progression and those who are approaching retirement. We have been working hard on what we can do to support them so they can continue to deliver and develop professionally in their role, whilst ensuring they are recognised and empowered. To support this further we have started focus groups to create a safe space for support workers to talk about what is important to them, i.e. education and changing the culture of working as a support worker. 

 “International recruitment had been happening through our business-as-usual advertising and we had seen a slow but reasonably steady supply of international candidates to our vacancies before the project. However, we are now part of the capital AHP consortia, and we are hoping that we will have ten new internationally educated OTs starting with us soon. We hope this work will tackle the workforce gaps in our biggest three AHP groups whilst we wait for some of the longer-term workforce initiatives e.g. apprenticeships and student placements to bear fruit in terms of the returns into our registered workforce.” 

The impact of the project and the value of HEE’s input

“There's been an increased focus on reviewing the skill mix of our workforce, particularly in some of our harder to recruit to vacancies. For example, following the capital AHP OT workforce summit for our region, there was an overarching worry that OT roles within community mental health had become very generic. The consequence of this seemed to be a reduced sense of job satisfaction across the OT workforce.

“This has been identified as a key factor impacting retention, and a series of collaborative projects have started within our trust reviewing the job descriptions for OTs where we have significant vacancies. The focus being to make these posts more attractive and widen the scope of applicants by formulating job descriptions around OTs’ core skill set. 

“Conversations around the creation of development type roles and posts at band 5 to 6 and band 6 to 7 have started. To support managers in feeling more confident to explore advertising for development roles, we have been looking at examples within the organisation and trying to develop more guidance. We have also looked at having more rotational posts, as evidence suggests there is interest in these at bands 5 and 6.  

“These will all be important strategies in helping us both to retain, deliver and attract new workforce moving forward. We are also looking to explore more advanced practice posts and really looking at how we can utilise them both to drive up quality in our clinical services, but also how we can retain the skills and experience of senior AHPs within the organisation. 

“The project has given us a reason to come together across the (ICS) and this has created a shared learning experience, one example of this is the creation of the AHP apprenticeship steering group which sits within the AHP faculty. We are also looking at developing our shared initiatives around return to practice (RtP) and have been delivering on shared communication to draw people back to practice within the NHS. If somebody approaches any one of the employers in our organisation interested in RtP, we look at their skills; their interests, where they are based geographically and connect them to the most appropriate employer – it is about thinking about the needs of the system and the best fit for the skill set of people that approach us.  

“This project has reenergised us as an organisation, we have been able to make an impact within our roles and it has given recognition to the workforce needs of AHPs. It has given us the validation we needed to drive forward positive change and ensure that these professions are able to continue to make effective contributions to patient care. HEE provided a huge amount of support, which gave the project status endorsement and the shared direction that has been needed to take this work forward.  

“Nationally and locally the resources that were made available to us have been so important, particularly through the masterclasses; the workshops, the webinars and the great speakers we have heard from. We have had access to all sorts of shared files and the value we will get back from this is going to be a 'gift that keeps on giving'.”