Our ambition
An integrated workforce that operates seamlessly through positive collaboration across Hertfordshire and west Essex delivering high-quality, person-centred care for our population.
Our challenges
Hertfordshire and west Essex shares common challenges relating to workforce as the wider regional and national health and care sector. These include:
- Vacancies within key clinical and care professional staff groups.
- There is ongoing anecdotal concern for staff wellbeing particularly from burnout and mental health concerns, with reducing resources and increasing demand on services.
- While there are projections of increased demand on health and care services, training and education pipelines have been continually reducing.
- The systems’ perceived productivity gap has increased since 2019, and more work is required to understand this in relation to complexity of care required and other issues.
- Industrial action has had an impact on productivity, and increased costs through agency usage.
- The system is also subject to higher rates of staff turnover across a number of staffing groups, this is particularly caused by the area’s high cost of living.
What our staff say
As a system our main method of capturing views on the staff experience within the system is via the NHS national staff survey. There are also alternative surveys and methods of monitoring staff experience in primary care, social care and the voluntary, community, faith and social enterprise sectors.
It is our ambition to improve our understanding of staff experience in Hertfordshire and west Essex, and where appropriate ensure there are concerted actions to make Hertfordshire and west Essex the best possible place to work, study and live.
This year’s NHS staff survey results broadly showed areas of progress and improvement across the system. This is particularly clear in the areas of staff engagement (with the exception of HWE ICB, potentially due to the amount of changes that have been undertaken across that organisation), as well as consistent improvements to staff morale across the system.
We know that there are consistent concerns across staff groups in Hertfordshire and west Essex, regardless of the sector. However, there are a number of differences between organisations in their areas of focus for improvement as a result of the staff survey feedback, and we will look to support those activities through the Retain area of the system workforce transformation plan as part of this programme going forwards.
2024-2026 priority: TRAIN
What will we do to make a difference
How will we know we made a difference?
We will have:
- turned around the decline in applications for clinical education to local and regional higher education institutions.
- developed effective domestic and local community pipelines across school, further education, higher education into health and care employment and be able to monitor progress of employment from local communities.
- been able to monitor apprenticeship levy spend and improve levels of spending through apprenticeship route development.
2024-2026 priority: RETAIN
What will we do to make a difference
How will we know we made a difference?
We will have:
- reduced staff turnover rates across the system and particularly within key staff groups
- reduced staff leaver rates, particularly within the first year of joining
- continued improvements to staff survey response and engagement
- effective monitoring and understanding of flexible working proposition.