What ever happened to WRaPT?

Not sure if you can recall but during the summer and early autumn the Academy worked hard to promote WRaPT. WRaPT is a workforce repository tool that supports the collection and analysis of workforce and activity data across multiple organisations. We hoped to use it to model the workforce across and within organization’s and use it to model the effect of various scenarios associated with the initiatives of the New Model of Care Vanguard.

The Academy went to every Federation to discuss WRaPT and then we spent a lot of time getting consent from every practice (except one) to share workforce and activity data.

The short answer to what happened to WRaPT is not a lot!

But there has been work around sharing what the workforce across the health economy is and you can read the summary document of the Connecting Care Wakefield Workforce Transformation Strategy here: https://connectingcarewakefield.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/CC-Strategy-Workforce-Summary-v2b.pdf

By the time we had consent from practices to share data the ‘free’ resource we had to study the data had gone. A precursor to understanding the activity data is to be clear about the question you want answering and we have not started that work.

Before we start modelling shifting work and resources we need to understand what activity is happening in general practice. This is more than counting how many patients GPs are seeing and includes measuring how much time they do other tasks such as dealing with letters, results and medication queries. And equally important what activity other members of the team are doing.

The questions we might be interested are:

• What is the impact of Clinical Pharmacists?
• What might be the impact of seeing the 30% of patients who don’t need to be seen at Emergency Departments in general practice?
• Can we model the impact of the Care Home Vanguard project across the local health economy?
• What might the training needs of a future general practice workforce look like?
• What would might be the impact of developing a fully integrated community and practice nursing team?

I have just been to a NHS New Care Models Project learning event about what has been learnt about workforce planning from Vanguard sites. Few things stood out for me: 

• Most local healthcare systems are where we are – ie. they have basic data and understanding about the current workforce
• But, not really done any activity analysis to understand what might happen with changing roles and workforce transformation
• They have used different workforce/analysis tools that have depended on their previous relationships with suppliers and how they were funded
• Those that have the most information and understanding have better funded analytics and support for this process
• Systems that are further on this road have a clear vision of the questions they want the analysis to answer that is not only from system leaders but present throughout their organisation

So, in Wakefield the next steps clearly need to be developing a shared vision of what question we want data from workforce and activity analysis to answer and then finding some resource to undertake proper collection and analysis of this data.