Practitioner’s Forum

Challenge

In Canada and abroad, the healthcare workforce is changing. Demographic shifts in both the patient and employee populations, concerns around the availability of clinical resources, as well as technological advances are changing the way we work with patients, and each other. The reality of fiscal restraint has not just meant ‘more with less’ and increasingly funding is linked to the quality and accountability agendas of governments. The clinical and support resources that are the healthcare workforce are critical to the sustainment of healthcare service delivery. The effective “mobilization” of these limited and highly skilled resources within health systems are a strategic lever to sustain service delivery and to advance excellence in patient care. To similar ends, the drive to achieve greater value has led many health systems to “consolidate” and/or increase coordination of local service delivery which provides opportunity for a more effective mobilization of the workforce.

These themes beg very important questions:

• What are the impacts of not developing strategic health human resources frameworks across national health systems?What are the impacts of not utilizing health human resources in a sustainable way? What is the leading practice?
•  How do we ensure that our health systems provide employees with a quality working experience in an ever-changing and demanding work environment?
• What is the role of culture in creating and enabling high-performance business practice, policies, and teams to improve quality within healthcare organizations?
• And, perhaps most sobering, how can workforce optimization remain an integral part of the policy agenda given the number of competing priorities?

Concurrent with these opportunities and challenges is the establishment of innovative portfolios focused strategically on the more effective working experience and utilization of frontline workers. A growing number of health systems are formally embedding and linking strategic health human resource frameworks to quality agendas. These portfolios go beyond recruitment/retention and broader planning practices and focus on innovations such as care model advance, strategic scheduling, predictive analytics, relief workforce strategies, measurement and reporting and related areas of services. Health Leaders are looking inward and calling for a type of system change that requires a broad yet focused dialogue. The objective of this comparative dialogue is to add to the formalization of leading practice and comparative lesson-drawing and to concentrate focus on specific areas linked to the effective mobilization of the healthcare workforce.

Background

In February 2017, the ICPA-Forum formally established a Practitioner’s Arm aiming to enhance interaction, coordination and meaningful dialogue between key operational and strategic decision-makers, academic researchers and other senior advisors. The policy arena chosen for initial focus and collaboration is healthcare policy and ICPA-Forum board member Shawn Drake is leading this work establishing this arm, on behalf of the ICPA-Forum. As the Practitioner’s Arm initiates, a model for collaboration has been developed and this model relies on a series of partnerships. To pilot this model within the vast healthcare policy space, we have chosen a specific emphasis on the effective mobilization of the workforce. This is given the significance of workforce challenges on the public agenda and in sustaining healthcare service delivery.

To advance that comparative dialogue and enable lesson-drawing in the field of healthcare, there is a requirement that practitioners and academics exchange knowledge. To those ends the ICPA-Forum is delighted to announce collaboration with the Canadian College of Health Leaders (CCHL). The ICPA-Forum will be seeking collaboration with other associations in developing Practitioner’s forums. It is our vision and intention that this work result in the development of tools and practices that can be used by practitioners in an effort to ensure the strategic use of human resources. We also aim to coordinate and identify opportunities to develop robust research questions and activity with academic partners under the organization of this Practitioner’s Forum. In developing this first Forum, please review the below which outlines how the ICPA-Forum and CCHL have gained momentum over the past year:

• In June 2017, invited health leaders from across Canada came together in a workshop held in conjunction with Canada’s National Health Leadership Conference.The outcomes of that workshop included the establishment of a comparative framework for understanding and improving workforce mobilization challenges and initiatives, and the development of focus areas within a workforce utilization or optimization realm which included:
  • Intake and Support for New Grads
  • Care Models
  • Staffing and Deployment
  • Workforce Planning
  • Shifting Service Delivery Impacts and Planning (transition)
  • Formalizing Patient Flow Practices
  • Architecture/Design and Space Planning Impacts on Service Delivery
  • Data Warehousing and Standard Key Performance or Tracking/Quality Indicators
• In October 2017, a second meeting was held as a special session of the BC Health Leadership Conference. The outcomes of this second meeting included:
  • Validation of focus areas and identification of additional areas to be considered as part of this initiative (i.e., national practitioner registry, focus on workforce lifecycle); and preliminary identification of the work required to achieve the vision over the next two years, and to obtain any expressions of interest to join the steering of this work.

Next Steps

Our progress, tasks and timeline will be updated on this page in order to document development of this initiative for the ICPA-Forum international community:

1. April 2018/May 2018: Confirm steering and identify professional, academic and other institutional partners for representation;
2. April/May 2018: By electronic survey/engagement to entire CCHL membership - Validate focus areas and initiate expressions of interest for participation and chairmanship of focus areas working groups;
3. May 2018: Confirm Practitioner and Academic participation and co-chairmanship of focus areas working groups;
4. June 2018: Hold business meeting, develop draft workplans, present formalized framework at NHLC in NFLD amongst assembled focus area working groups (Celebrate 1st Anniversary of Formal Initiation of the Comparative Forum on Healthcare Workforce Mobilization);
5. July 2018: Formalize the activities that include planning towards NHLC in June 2019 in Toronto.

Governance

The Steering Committee for this initiative is currently being formalized and will be announced at a later date. We are seeking nominations of leaders wanting to participate in this exciting initiative by serving on the various working groups and to join us in our community of change. To participate in developing the comparative dialogue on this important policy intersection required to stabilize healthcare service delivery, please forward your name to Courtney L. Scott, Executive Secretary and Treasurer to the JCPA/ICPA-Forum: treasurer@comparativepolicy.org