Who?
Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust, a provider of community and inpatient mental healthcare, runs three hospitals and serves a population of 840,000 in Southeast London.
The Challenge
Amid pressure on the NHS, the Trust was expanding operations and needed to improve its management of the workforce, including:
- A clearer view of its baseline workforce position,
- Better workforce planning capability at team level across Directorates,
- Switching from a ‘firefighting’ culture with a focus on short-term issues such as current vacancies to address long-term staffing needs,
- Adopt a standardised approach to workforce planning.
How we helped
Moorhouse provided a range of People, Change and Organisational Development services, such as Capacity Modelling, Workforce Planning, Training and Upskilling to help Oxleas better understand their baseline workforce position, staffing level and risk areas, and align it to a five-year workforce trajectory.
Our solutions included:
- Deep dive assessment and analysis of the Oxleas workforce to identify the demand and supply challenges, workforce projections, future changes, challenges, and risks.
- Creation of a strategic paper presenting key workforce challenges and potential solutions, which was presented to the SEL ICS, Oxleas Workforce Steering Group and the Transformation Board.
- Development of a step-by-step workforce planning method, aligned to the annual budgeting cycle and Safer Staffing requirements to standardise workforce planning activities across Directorates.
- Training sessions to use the Workforce Planning Toolkit, which includes a demand and capacity model to identify future workforce risks and enable scenario analysis based on modifying variables (e.g., Turnover rates). We also created a ‘skills mix’ tool to undertake task-based activity analysis and review role substitution options.
Outcomes
- Enhanced visibility of the workforce position, at a Trust, Directorate, and profession level.
- Workforce reporting and creation of a demand & capacity model for future needs, enabling an independent but consistent approach across Directorates.
- Toolkit enabling data-led workforce analysis at a Directorate level, plus aggregation at a Trust-wide level.
- Improved capability in workforce planning for the People team, Directorate Leads and wider stakeholders.
- Prioritisation of key workforce improvement recommendations that the Trust can take forward.
- Increased focus on more strategic workforce planning, with improved alignment between HR and Finance departments.
The Moorhouse work provided rich analysis and insight to give us a clear view of our workforce position, key gaps and a set of recommendations owned by our organisation that we are taking forward. This is a key enabler to achieve our strategy. The Moorhouse team brought high quality people, an approach that combined data analysis with positive engagement of our service teams to reinforce what we were already doing well and opportunities to build upon,”
Director of People and Strategy, Oxleas
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