Tools

Welcome to the Skills for Health Tools page. Here you can find all of the tools that are within our portfolio. Feel free to browse through our portfolio by clicking on any of the tools below. Once satisfied you have found the tool that meets your needs click on 'Launch Tool' to be directed to its home page.

<p>Enables you to search the National Occupational Standards (NOS) database for specific competences. Competences can be used for a wide range of purposes including: </p>
<ul>
<li>Individual, team or service design or redesign </li>
<li>Team and Organisational Development</li>
<li>Appraisal and Personal Development assessment and planning</li>
<li>Work based assessment of competence</li>
<li>Performance management</li>
<li>Recruitment and selection</li>
<li>Induction planning</li>
<li>Career planning and management</li>
<li>Training and learning programmes</li>
<li>Development of skills audits</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>

<p>Enables you to use the Knowledge Skills Framework outline of a specific post to select and find competences in the database that are mapped to the post's dimensions/levels.</p>

<p>The 'My Lists' environment has been designed to allow you to store your own unique collection of competences for any purpose. For example, competence lists could relate to role/team profiles or modules of learning etc. This new environment has been designed to make it easier for you to access your work and also to improve flexibility and efficiency when working with competence lists. </p>

<p>Enables you to undertake a skills mix analysis of your team. It can show you where the team has gaps in competence as well as showing which competences are met and by whom. It can also predict the impact of skills loss when a team member is leaving.</p>

<p>This self-assessment tool helps individuals and organisations examine their capability in workforce planning. And it enables them to determine their state of readiness to plan the workforce effectively.
As a respondent, you can record your capability on each of 17 competences for workforce planning. And you can indicate how much of your time you spend on that competence. The tool generates charts that you can print out and use to inform your own continuous professional development.</p>

<p>The Doctors Rostering System (DRS) is software designed to support the complex task of ensuring junior doctor working practices are in line with the New Deal (ND) and the European Working Time Directive (EWTD).</p>
<p>Its main features include the provision of analysis and data management tools, along with ministerial returns and rebanding functions. It assists with the design of ND and EWTD compliant work patterns and produces detail and summary reports.</p>
<p>Created within the NHS, it is maintained with the help of DRS users and national ND and EWTD experts. This ensures it is consistently being developed for the workforce and in line with legislation or practice changes which may affect the rules.</p>

<p>This tool allows you to analyse your current HaN arrangements in an acute or mental health organisation, to assess your progress towards achieving HaN. It aids the trust to implement, or extend their HaN service, and to see the impact of progress over time. It is of help to those who want to integrate multi professional teamwork out of hours, handover and patient prioritising supporting clinical governance and management out of hours.</p>
<p>The online tool has been developed with the assistance of the Workforce Review Team (WRT). Data was used by the HaN team to produce a national baseline assessment.</p>

<p>Good data is an essential part of planning your workforce or services, but where can you find all the data you require? Skills for Health - Workforce Projects Team developed the NHS Benchmarking Database tool to provide you with a single access point to a range of acute sector, mental health, PCT, plus new ambulance and maternity NHS data sources.</p>
<p>The search engine that supports the five databases is updated on a quarterly basis to ensure information is up to the minute. It makes the database easy to use and gives you the information you need within seconds. You can access over 900 different variables and compare your organisation to single or multiple ones across the NHS.</p>

<p>The NHS Workforce Review Team, through a partnership approach, working with Skills For Health - Workforce Projects Team, developed a web based solution to assist NHS organisations in WTD rota compilation by providing access to a compendium of approved rotas, which can be used as templates as well as providing valuable information on how other NHS organisations are using their staff to manage medical rotas.
It has powerful search engine capabilities with a library of over 100 WTD compliant rotas, currently in use in the NHS which can be searched using a range of options and then used by colleagues in the NHS involved in workforce planning. Four clicks of the mouse gets you through to the type of rota you are looking for.</p>

<p>The Workforce Reconfiguration Planning Tool, designed by NHS Plymouth, shows the current and proposed skill mix of staff in post for any given service and the associated pay costs. The tool also displays a current and future skill mix index, and percentages of senior staff (band 5 and above) and very senior staff (band 8 and above).</p>
<p>The tool is designed to support NHS managers, heads of service and workforce planners in planning and costing changes to their skill mix for service delivery redesign. It also provides a concise depiction of costed skill mix change proposals for use with senior managers and commissioning bodies.</p>

Enables you to search the National Occupational Standards (NOS) database for specific competences. Competences can be used for a wide range of purposes including:

Individual, team or service design or redesign
Team and Organisational Development
Appraisal and Personal Development assessment and planning
Work based assessment of competence
Performance management
Recruitment and selection
Induction planning
Career planning and management
Training and learning programmes
Development of skills audits

Enables you to use the Knowledge Skills Framework outline of a specific post to select and find competences in the database that are mapped to the post's dimensions/levels.

The 'My Lists' environment has been designed to allow you to store your own unique collection of competences for any purpose. For example, competence lists could relate to role/team profiles or modules of learning etc. This new environment has been designed to make it easier for you to access your work and also to improve flexibility and efficiency when working with competence lists.

Enables you to undertake a skills mix analysis of your team. It can show you where the team has gaps in competence as well as showing which competences are met and by whom. It can also predict the impact of skills loss when a team member is leaving.

This self-assessment tool helps individuals and organisations examine their capability in workforce planning. And it enables them to determine their state of readiness to plan the workforce effectively. As a respondent, you can record your capability on each of 17 competences for workforce planning. And you can indicate how much of your time you spend on that competence. The tool generates charts that you can print out and use to inform your own continuous professional development.

The Doctors Rostering System (DRS) is software designed to support the complex task of ensuring junior doctor working practices are in line with the New Deal (ND) and the European Working Time Directive (EWTD).

Its main features include the provision of analysis and data management tools, along with ministerial returns and rebanding functions. It assists with the design of ND and EWTD compliant work patterns and produces detail and summary reports.

Created within the NHS, it is maintained with the help of DRS users and national ND and EWTD experts. This ensures it is consistently being developed for the workforce and in line with legislation or practice changes which may affect the rules.

This tool allows you to analyse your current HaN arrangements in an acute or mental health organisation, to assess your progress towards achieving HaN. It aids the trust to implement, or extend their HaN service, and to see the impact of progress over time. It is of help to those who want to integrate multi professional teamwork out of hours, handover and patient prioritising supporting clinical governance and management out of hours.

The online tool has been developed with the assistance of the Workforce Review Team (WRT). Data was used by the HaN team to produce a national baseline assessment.

Good data is an essential part of planning your workforce or services, but where can you find all the data you require? Skills for Health - Workforce Projects Team developed the NHS Benchmarking Database tool to provide you with a single access point to a range of acute sector, mental health, PCT, plus new ambulance and maternity NHS data sources.

The search engine that supports the five databases is updated on a quarterly basis to ensure information is up to the minute. It makes the database easy to use and gives you the information you need within seconds. You can access over 900 different variables and compare your organisation to single or multiple ones across the NHS.

The NHS Workforce Review Team, through a partnership approach, working with Skills For Health - Workforce Projects Team, developed a web based solution to assist NHS organisations in WTD rota compilation by providing access to a compendium of approved rotas, which can be used as templates as well as providing valuable information on how other NHS organisations are using their staff to manage medical rotas. It has powerful search engine capabilities with a library of over 100 WTD compliant rotas, currently in use in the NHS which can be searched using a range of options and then used by colleagues in the NHS involved in workforce planning. Four clicks of the mouse gets you through to the type of rota you are looking for.

The Workforce Reconfiguration Planning Tool, designed by NHS Plymouth, shows the current and proposed skill mix of staff in post for any given service and the associated pay costs. The tool also displays a current and future skill mix index, and percentages of senior staff (band 5 and above) and very senior staff (band 8 and above).

The tool is designed to support NHS managers, heads of service and workforce planners in planning and costing changes to their skill mix for service delivery redesign. It also provides a concise depiction of costed skill mix change proposals for use with senior managers and commissioning bodies.

Another tool to help you find relevant competences. The tool is based upon the Skills for Health 'Health Functional Map' and covers all of the functions that are needed to deliver effective health care services. It contains a breakdown of levels, starting with broad functions, drilling down to more detailed functions. The end point of the map is where National Occupational Standards (NOS) sit and from where you can add them to your profiles.

Contains lists of competences that have been have been mapped by Skills for Health to actual job descriptions. They have not been externally validated, and they are not intended to be an exemplars of any kind, but simply example lists of competences which you may consider useful when working with similar jobs, or looking at care pathways.

Enables you undertake an assessment of your own abilities against competences in lists/profiles. Results are shown graphically so you can easily see your where your strengths and weaknesses lie.

NWR is an award winning web based solution that supports the generation and population of rotas for healthcare staff. It helps with planning and optimising rotas, taking into account factors such as specialty cover, annual leave, shift swaps and unexpected absence, it also acts as a hub for communication between junior doctors and the rota manager, as well as providing staff around your trust with accurate information of who is on shift, and how they can be contacted. The tool also helps ensure that shifts are performed by well rested doctors working within legal European Working Time Directive (EWTD) 2009 compliant hours and contractual rest requirements, providing accurate compliance analysis as rotas are updated.

This is a step by step e-learning guide. It is an educational training tool and also practical guide to sustainable and evidence based workforce planning. Workforce planning in the NHS is a key skill that managers and planners at all levels of an organisation require, but one which is often not provided through core training.

Use of the guide across workforce planning will help ensure that decisions made around design and recruitment of new staff and teams are sustainable, realistic and fully support the delivery of quality patient care and productivity and efficiency.

The guide takes the user through six clear steps to develop their workforce plan. It's a format that planners can use at their own pace as an educational resource or refer to as a best practice guide when they are developing plans in the future.

This tool aims to assist nursing workforce planning and help make better decisions about cost effective numbers and mixes of nurses.

The tool includes five workforce planning methods:

Professional judgement approach
Nurses per occupied bed
Activity quality
Time task/activity approaches
Regression based systems.

There is an accompanying report that details the strengths and weaknesses of all the planning methods and the software tool allows calculations to be triangulated and 'what if' scenarios undertaken before a final decision about staffing numbers is taken.

The Labour Market and Policy Tool provides access to a wide range of employment, skills, training and demographic statistics related to the health sector. This is a single source through which workforce planners, researchers and other stakeholders can view data by sector and geography, and follow links to related websites and sources of data.

The Workforce Evaluation Tool supports the Six Steps Guide to Workforce Planning by featuring an online balance scorecard which helps users evaluate and monitor changes in workforce practice. The tool works alongside step five: developing and implementation of an action plan, plus step six: implementation, monitoring and refresh.

The tool evaluates organisational performance from four key perspectives: service, workforce, customer and financial, by allowing users to set measurable goals which can then be mapped against actual organisational performance. The tool offers a visual representation of the users success in the four key perspectives, but also alerts the user to early warnings when the plan is not on course to achieve the goals.

The tool allows data input at a local level to monitor performance and users also have the option to select pre defined metric headings.

The Assessing Workforce Supply Tool generates workforce supply profiles and reports from Electronic Staff Record (ESR) and other staffing databases using Microsoft Excel. It produces statistical and graphical reports based on a host of factors including staff group, pay band, knowledge and skills framework (KSF) competence, sickness and absence, age, leavers and new starters.

Whether you're looking for individual statistics, such as sickness and absence or attempting to display a more holistic report, this tool illustrates the process for you. It's designed to profile the current staff at a trust/PCT and help the organisation illustrate their workforce supply issues and aid workforce planning.

The database was created to inform workforce planning initiatives, assess organisation's performance and provide organisations with the facility of benchmarking themselves in relation to the maternity matters policy to ensure they are compliant with new regulations.

The database was commissioned by NHS Yorkshire and the Humber. All updates to the database are published on this portal.