It is recognised that demand within the NHS is increasing and that there is a shortage of staff to keep pace with the increasing demand. One way to address the increase in demand is to look at working differently. This may involve changing processes and upskilling staff to deliver services in a new or different way.

Many succesfull new and different ways of working have been demonstrated during the COVID pandemic, things cannot be allowed to return to the way they were previously if they have demonstrated a benefit to citizens and the service.

Deciding on and implementing new ways of working is not something that can be done alone, you should involve the skill set and strenghts of colleagues such as finance colleagues and workforce planning colleagues.

Education is the foundation of the excellent care given in NHS Wales, it underpins everything staff at all levels do, to support and provide care to citizens; and staff need to feel they have opportunity to develop and grow in their roles.

Education is linked to new ways of working upskilling staff and creating new roles and should be one of the first considerations when considering any of the above.

In addition to commissioning formal education for Nursing and Health Professions across Wales, HEIW is leading the way in developing education and training for clinical staff at all levels. The xxxxx contains resources to support education of staff ensuring the workingforce is well equipped with the right skills and knowledge to effectively carry out its duties.

The Welsh Levels of Care is the national patient acuity and dependency tool that has been devised for use within adult acute medical and surgical areas to measure patient acuity (copy attached).

The tool has also be adapted for use within paediatric inpatient areas (copy attached) and is widely used by nursing teams within these areas across Wales to measure the acuity and dependency of patients. The information is used to inform decision regarding the deployment of nursing staff and as part of the triangulated approach, to calculate the nurse staffing levels required to meet the needs of patients

The health visiting workstream, mental health workstream and district nursing workstream are in the process of developing the Welsh Levels of Care tool for their areas of speciality, by co-producing the tools with frontline nursing teams and conducting testing to refine the tool and develop the evidence base.

For more information about the development of these tools and the extensive work that is being undertaken by NHS Wales to deliver the All Wales Nurse Staffing Programme please visit the website. All Wales nurse staffing programme - HEIW (nhs.wales)

Workforce planning and information is at the heart of Health Education and Improvement Wales (HEIW).

Organisations need to plan their workforce based on the needs of their population (short, medium and long term), to effectively deploy and utilise their workforce. Resources to support organisations to do this are contained in links below: