Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation Trust

In a time of public sector financial pressure and the need to ensure its workforce was as productive as possible, the workforce directorate at Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation Trust set out a vision to better equip leaders to lead their teams and ultimately deliver better patient care. 

It was clear from the outset that data was going to be fundamental: managers needed to both easily access and use workforce data to enable focus on key areas of need, enhance team performance and improve productivity. Where previously workforce metrics were often looked at in isolation, the aim was to build insight and narrative that better highlighted and explored the relationships and influences that workforce metrics have on each other, such as sickness absence and staff turnover.

Consolidating workforce data from various systems was a key objective and challenge for the initiative, and effective collaboration with key stakeholders – such as finance, resourcing and business intelligence colleagues – was essential. A system alignment project was undertaken to ensure common and correct operational naming conventions across all systems, and over 18 months the structures in the workforce, finance and clinical systems were slowly aligned. 

A co-production approach to understanding what operational managers wanted and needed from their workforce data was undertaken, identifying champions and testing initial dashboard designs using key workforce metrics and, following feedback, the team worked with managers to co-design a suite of reports that were meaningful and useful. The team takes a ‘continuous improvement’ approach and regularly reviews and develops the dashboards to meet the changing needs of users, an “iterative approach” that impressed the PMAs judges, who “loved the team’s enthusiasm and energy” in “raising the organisation’s HR, workforce and manager capability through this initiative”. 

As the dashboards became more widely available, the trust provided training and showcase events to ensure staff understood how to access the dashboards, what the data was showing and how it could be useful to them. Now, the dashboards are used regularly and are a “pivotal” part of workforce reporting in the trust, used for board and sub-committee reporting. They are accessed regularly by managers supporting them to manage their teams and aid operational decision making.