Skills for Health has developed a series of demonstrator sites, to work with a cross-section of partners to trial and test our workforce development tools and competences.
They support a variety of public and independent healthcare organisations by helping to create new and relevant roles while improving and delivering new services for patients and other healthcare users. Through pilot studies across the UK, our 6 sites are building a strong track record demonstrating best practice, workforce development tools and underlining the importance of National Occupational Standards (NOS) and National Workforce Competences (NWC).
South Birmingham Primary Care Trust (PCT) is part of a School Health Demonstrator project, assessing and evaluating the effectiveness of the new role of Community Support Nurse (CSN).
The demonstrator site team wanted to look at competences for the role of the CSN working within the School Health Team in a project funded by the Department of Health (England) and led by Skills for Health. This new role works across health and education, providing services to vulnerable children and their families, particularly non-attendees and those living in hard to reach communities.
The CSN role is progressing and is already bringing benefits with improved school attendance by vulnerable children and better referral to, and relationships with, other health and social care services.
"The project has highlighted the real benefits a structured competence based approach can offer for service induction and training planning for service redesign."
Pam Truman
Project Manager School Health Demonstrator Site, South Birmingham PCT
Managers at Central Manchester and Manchester Children's University Hospitals NHS Trust wanted to see how workforce analysis and process mapping could help deliver better services for patients, improve waiting times and support staff career development. It soon became clear that new and developed roles were part of the answer to supporting the Trust's 18 week target and its Early Achiever agenda, which aims to deliver the target 12 months ahead of the national schedule.
The Trust discovered that by reshaping the workforce, in particular Allied Health Professionals (AHPs) and Health Care Scientists (HCS), the result would be a more flexible and responsive team configuration for improved service delivery.
Working with the demonstrator team, Trust managers looked at existing patient pathways and the use of competence-based approaches to pinpoint and unblock barriers in the system.
Early evidence shows that in certain diagnostic areas the waiting times have been reduced from 35 weeks to 19 and it was felt that the new roles would lead to further reductions in waiting times.
"We intend to continue the work started by this project to reduce waiting time for our service users and will work towards implementing a competence-based approach to future workforce development and service delivery."
Anne-Marie Varney
Project Manager, Central Manchester and Manchester Children's University Hospitals NHS Trust
