Lancashire and South Cumbria Integrated Care System Five-Year Workforce Strategy and Education and Training Plan

The NHS Transformation Unit (TU) were commissioned to develop a five-year workforce strategy and education and training plan for the health and care system across Lancashire and South Cumbria. Looking at the entire workforce across health, social care and voluntary, community, faith and social enterprise (VCFSE) partners, offered the opportunity to develop a co-ordinated and aligned approach to address common challenges. 

The Challenge

Lancashire and South Cumbria Integrated Care Board wished to create a system-wide workforce strategy and accompanying education and training plan. This would be the first time that partners from health, social care and the VCFSE sector had developed a joint strategy on this scale.

Our Approach

To develop the strategy:

• We set up a steering group of senior leaders from health, social care and the VCFSE sector. This group provided oversight and support to the development of the strategy.
  
• With the support of steering group members, we mapped out stakeholders from different sectors and in different roles. This included people working at system and individual organisation level in service delivery and workforce experts. Our stakeholder engagement approach was tailored to fit the audience, using a combination of 1:1 meetings, interviews and workshops.
  
• There were two phases of engagement:
  – In phase one we met with all identified stakeholders and explored their thoughts, views, ideas and concerns. This phase gave us a clear understanding of the strengths, opportunities and challenges within each sector and as a system.
  
  – ­Following a review of the phase one engagement outputs, phase two was a series of cross-sector, multi-professional workshops, aligned to the place-based partnerships in Lancashire and South Cumbria but with an open invite across the system. This phase brought people together to discuss and prioritise the opportunities for the whole system.
  
• Alongside the engagement work, we undertook a comprehensive review of best practice and innovation. This looked at all sectors and considered how we could take the learning from other areas. We also reviewed relevant workforce and population health data to ensure we had a full picture of the workforce.
  
• We socialised the strategy in existing engagement forums across the sectors in order to refine and endorse the content ahead of being taken through formal governance.

The Outcome

We produced a Lancashire and South Cumbria five-year workforce strategy and education and training plan which reflects the strengths and needs of the whole health and care system.

All partners were engaged and involved throughout the process, and we received feedback from colleagues in different sectors noting they felt the process was inclusive of all partners.

We facilitated an initial implementation planning session with the multi-sector steering group to agree next steps for implementing the identified priorities. This session, alongside the two documents that we produced will support the further development of a ‘one workforce’ approach within the Lancashire and South Cumbria health and care system. This will benefit everyone who lives or works in Lancashire and South Cumbria and will support the delivery of the system’s Joint Forward Plan.

The Lancashire and South Cumbria Integrated Care Board (ICB) approved both documents in May 2024, and the system is moving forward to implementation.