INNOVATION & EFFICIENCY
Donna Sidonio, Assistant Director of Workforce Strategy at NHS North of England, is leading the North West’s eWin project, which uses qualitative and quantitative benchmarking and knowledge-exchange to support NHS workforce professionals, and is now being rolled out in other parts of the country. She spoke to NHE.
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Win, the Workforce Information Net- work Portal, has only been active for NHS organisations in the north west since June 2010, but its potential has already been spotted by professionals elsewhere in the country.
It is now being rolled out in the Yorkshire & the Humber region, and it will then be piloted in East of England, followed by South Central.
Donna Sidonio, project leader, told NHE: “This was a completely unexpected devel- opment; we set it up very much as a north west resource, but when discussing our work at events and meetings, others from the NHS workforce & HR community real- ly liked it. They’ve been working with us to replicate it and roll it out in those regions.”
Some elements of the web portal will be redesigned, and some will be generic, but others will be specific to the region – it is this aspect that has proved particularly useful for many of its 1,400 individual us- ers in the north west, where it has 98% or- ganisational buy-in across the NHS.
Sidonio told us: “We’re leading the roll-out for those other regions; we started off with a knowledge of how it all works.
“We’re working with the supplier, Boil- erhouse Ltd, to redesign elements of it for Yorkshire & the Humber, but there will also be some features that are generic, be- cause that’s what we’ve agreed with other regions. It’s a hybrid, with some national features and some regional features.
“It made sense for other regions to use the expertise we already had, and to save mon- ey, rather than sending other people off to go and start from scratch. That’s a produc- tivity saving in itself.”
She added: “Fundamentally, the purpose of eWin is to support organisations to de- liver QIPP, but particularly from a work- force perspective.
“It offers member organisations online ac- cess to quite a wide range of quantitative and qualitative services, to support them in driving up productivity.
“It complements other resources – there are other national resources that are do- ing some parallel work – but it also has a strong regional focus. That’s where it’s dif- ferent. It also contains a number of unique features that aren’t available elsewhere.”
Workforce is usually said to make up roughly 70% of NHS costs, and clearly there are workforce implications under the QIPP agenda.
A key element of the quantitative side of eWin is the benchmarking service.
Sidonio explained: “It enables organisa- tions, at a high, strategic level, to bench- mark themselves against other organisa- tions in the north west around a number of core workforce metrics, for example sickness absence. That’s always one of the big topics: how are you doing nationally, against other organisations.
“Organisations can go into eWin and find out immediately how they stand in relation to their peer organisations across the north west.
“The data on the benchmarking site is up- dated every month, drawn from the elec- tronic staff record – the data warehouse – and translated to be used in the eWin metrics.”
The main qualitative element is the ‘knowl- edge exchange’, built around best-practice case studies.
Sidonio said: “We use the knowledge ex- change to capture good practice across a range of workforce and HR areas.
“We do encourage people to tell us about their good work, and if necessary go and
help them create the case studies, but we also get them submitted voluntarily.
“eWin is intended to appeal to people with a number of different functions in work- force and HR. The benchmarking side is of particular interest to workforce planners and analysts, and chief executives and HR directors at a strategic level.
“The knowledge exchange complements that and tends to be of greater interest to the HR community, as opposed to the ana- lytical community.”
She said that the eWin team – which is relatively small, with 3.5 full time equiva- lent staff dedicated to it – is keen to work with other relevant bodies around the NHS where it can.
They also want to develop the system’s linkages with QIPP. It already contains a QIPP dashboard, which provides a high- level analysis of how organisations are per- forming against specific QIPP metrics.
These include workforce trajectories; real staffing levels against planned staffing lev- els; clinical vs non-clinical staff; the pro- portion of total staff who are managers; the skill mix of staff; and productivity.
Sidonio added: “There’s more work that we’re doing to develop that with our QIPP colleagues in the north west.”
The team actively promotes the eWin con- cept at regional and national events – in- cluding the recent NHS Employers confer- ence in Liverpool – and offers dedicated training sessions to particular audiences.
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www.ewin.northwest.nhs.uk national health executive Nov/Dec 11 | 39
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