There’s a simple truth at the heart of NHS workforce planning: If your data is unreliable, your plans will be too.

That’s why, when we began working with a Trust in the northwest of England, we didn’t jump straight into giving them a new system or recommending service changes. We started with diagnostics. And we did them not once, but twice.

First, we looked at what was already in their system. What were the existing job plans saying? Where were the gaps? How consistent was the data across specialties? What did the old reports really tell us? And who wasn’t engaging with the process at all?

Then we got to work. Delivering training, engaging consultants, cleansing data, implementing job planning templates, and facilitating consistency panels.

And once those new plans were submitted?

We ran the diagnostics again.

The difference was staggering.

What was once a patchwork of unclear roles and inconsistent PAs is now a structured, specialty-aligned dataset that leaders can trust. They can see true Direct Clinical Care capacity. They can identify where Supporting PAs are over- or under-assigned. They can make sense of SPA vs DCC split across the Trust. And most importantly, they can act on it.

The improvement isn’t just visible in the data. It’s visible in how people now use it. Clinical leads are starting to compare productivity across teams. Service managers are using job plans to assess delivery against demand. Executives can plan for the year ahead with far greater confidence.

And this is only the beginning.

We’re about to release our Capacity and Demand Report for Elderly Medicine, where these insights come to life. It’s a detailed look at how better planning and clean data lead to better alignment between patient need and workforce capacity.
Follow us on LinkedIn to see this report when it’s first released.