Archived: Originally published on 15 March 2018. There will be no further updates to this Open Educational Resource.

Planning for the future

Skilled, confident, agile workforce

Over time following this approach to workforce planning will result in staff being and feeling skilled and able to manage uncertainty, as well as being agile in the face of change. We may start to see similar health and social care roles, the development of joint objectives, joint qualifications and joint registration. If that is how the workforce of tomorrow is defined, integration will have been successful.

There are few quality tools at present to help staff self-assess this kind of confidence and skill set or to identify gaps in knowledge and skills. The Quality Improvement Framework (QI) Workforce Development Tool is, however, a good resource.

Resources and signposting

The QI Workforce Development Tool is an online system designed to allow individuals working in health and social care partnerships to assess their own levels of capability and confidence in a range of areas of expertise relating to QI. (To access the QI Workforce Development Tool you will need to use an OpenAthens account. If you are a new user register at Athens registration or on the SSKS website.

The system also allows users to record information about the team roles they have performed on QI initiatives/projects and any formal professional development that has contributed to their skills in QI.

The tool can then generate reports that provide a picture of overall QI capability and confidence in their organisation, and across NHS Scotland.

The National Health and Social Care Workforce Plan (Part 1 – NHS and Part 2 – Social Care) provides recommendations to support health and social care organisations to identify and develop the workforce needed to deliver safe and sustainable services to Scotland's people. Part 3 of the plan will be published in early 2018. Work arising from the recommendations in the three parts of the plan aims to enable the production of a combined Health and Social Care Workforce Plan in 2018.

The Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework (SCQF) is Scotland’s national qualifications framework. The SCQF supports lifelong learning and can help:

workers to access appropriate education and training over their career
employers, learners and the general public to understand the full range of Scottish qualifications, how qualifications relate to each other and to other forms of learning, and how different types of qualification can contribute to improving the skills of the workforce.

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Planning for the future by the Scottish Social Services Council is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://learn.sssc.uk.com.