3 Assessing demand
The purpose of any workforce plan is to ensure that the workforce resources are in place to support the planned delivery of services. To do this requires consideration of the following issues:
- Services: What services are required to meet the patients' needs and how are they planned to change?
- Workforce Inputs: What are the workforce inputs required to deliver specific services?
- Requirements: How do these workforce inputs map onto workforce skills, roles and numbers?
- Options: What options exist for changing workforce demand through new service models or ways of working?
What do we mean by demand?
By workforce 'demand', we mean the numbers and types of people needed to achieve the planned service activities and what skills they need to possess.
Planning workforce demand cannot be done in isolation. It needs to be done as a integral part of the wider service and financial planning process. Workforce demand will be driven by the planned delivery of services but workforce is also a limited resource, like finance, which may constrain the services that can be delivered.
The ideal process would bring together:
- Population health needs
- How this translates into demand for services
- The planned provision of services to meet these needs which will be informed by national and local policy on the quality of provision
- The service models that are planned to deliver these services
- Ways of working including current staffing models, new roles, skill mix and productivity changes
What we don’t mean
Workforce planners often refer to ‘replacement demand’ or ‘demand for new qualifiers’. In this guide these are dealt with as part of the supply equation in step 4.