Strategic Workforce Planning (SWiPe®)

WSP is the home of population health led strategic workforce planning.  Over the past ten years we have worked with a wide range of clients to refine this approach and have sown the seeds of a more strategic approach to workforce planning in an increasingly integrated health and care system.  SWiPe® represents the body of intelligence built up over this extensive period of engagement with colleagues.  It has the key distinctive of rooting strategic workforce planning in a prospective view of the future needs of a given population.  It then uses the concepts of care functions and skill levels to encourage people to explore new roles and new ways of delivering care that more closely matches local need.

To bring consistency and the benefits of the learning and insights from a wide range of stakeholders we have developed a consistent framework and given it a name, SWiPe®.  People who choose to use SWiPe®, supported by WSP, can be assured of the benefits of the accrued learning of over ten years of development.  The distinctives of SWiPe® include:

  • The ability to integrate assumptions and outputs for underlying health needs and demand drivers, service transformation and activity changes, finance and strategic workforce planning;
  • The ability of the framework to work across agencies and organisations, thus enabling a truly ‘whole workforce’ approach based on population/patient cohorts of need;
  • The use of ‘care functions’ as the building blocks for service change, enabling existing and new services to be framed in the language of outcomes;
  • Working with skill levels rather than professional or grade definitions, thus enabling new and existing roles to be mapped against an ideal future skill mix for a particular care function, delivered in the context of population health needs.

SWiPe® can be applied at different levels, as illustrated in the picture below:

 

Examples of SWiPe® models can be seen on our model hosting page or by searching our library of projects, and a briefing on the framework can be downloaded here.

To find out more about what we mean by workforce planning download our ‘Workforce Planning in a Nutshell’ briefing here.

For more information please contact Peter Lacey.

Note: SWiPe is a Registered Trademark owned by Whole Systems Partnership Limited. We encourage people to share the SWiPe  framework and adapt the materials locally, on the condition that the framework is made available subject to the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence requiring attribution to WSP and is limited to non-commercial use