Health & Care Academy Barking & Dagenham, Havering & Redbridge (BHR)

We’ve developed the first workforce dashboard that pulls together health & social care data. It captures insights at a greater depth than any other tool available.

Emily Plane, Head of Strategy and System Development, BHR Integrated Care Partnership

About the partnership

1. BHR Integrated Care Partnership is a partnership spanning the three boroughs of Redbridge, Barking & Dagenham and Havering, working to a common set of values and principles.
2. The Partnership collectively employs over 33,000 people.
3. The Integrated Health & Care Academy, approved by the Integrated Care Executive Group, was launched in September 2021.
4. The Academy aims to promote education, learning and training; improve recruitment and retention; and build human resources management and leadership capability and capacity. It has also developed a workforce dashboard across health and care across the system, to provide greater insight into key system challenges around recruitment and retention.

What has gone well

1. Understanding what should be delivered as the Partnership has developed.
2. Greater clarity around what the workforce looks like across Health and Social Care and increased engagement with local stakeholders.

Challenges experiences and overcome

1. Outer London wages bring challenges around recruitment and retention especially in key roles like district and practice nursing and Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme role.
2. Underfunding, for example public health funding.
3. To date the Academy has been funded on a pump-prime basis but to maximise the benefits a more sustainable approach to funding is needed.

Results

1. First workforce dashboard that joins up Health and Social Care data which captures insights at a greater depth than any other tools available. The dashboard enables granular views to support transformation work.
2. Plans for Career Pathway Accelerators for people with no qualifications to help launch careers into health and care – building on Allied Health Professionals pathways.
3. Mayor’s funding secured to train 750 people with few or no qualifications into careers in Health and Social Care.
4. Worker passports and System Workforce bank to enable staff to work across the partnership.

What made the difference

1. Innovative and integrated: ‘Burning platform’ of key workforce challenges and history of unsustainable initiatives, which motivated the Partnership to look for innovative and integrated solutions that don’t simply shift workforce around.
2. Having 10 years of very strong relationships and collaboration: This helped the partnership to come together and develop the academy.
3. Collective: there is a buy-in as partners who are collectively invested in the programme and have a joint team that works across the organisations with joint SROs across the acute and primary care.