Our people strategy
Our strategic goals…
Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust is here to be a key partner in our local health system and to drive health and healthcare innovation, delivering outstanding care, education and research with local, national and worldwide impact. The organisational strategy will be supported by four enabling strategies; (the clinical strategy, the quality strategy, the people strategy and the digital strategy). The people strategy will enable the Trust and staff to deliver the vision and strategic goals and help transform the culture of Imperial by the further embedding of the values and behaviours.
Our strategic goals are:
- To help create a high-quality integrated care system with the population of North West London (NWL)
- To develop a sustainable portfolio of outstanding services
- To build learning, improvement and innovation into everything we do
Building on strengths…
This strategy builds on the strengths of the Trust: our long and successful track record in clinical research and education; our consistently low mortality rates and our nationally leading trauma, stroke and heart centres. Our greatest strength is our people – we have a wealth of experienced and committed staff who deliver great care to our patients. However, to deliver 21st century care for our patients, we will need to transform our workforce.
We recognise the importance of developing a sustainable pipeline of staff for the Trust with sufficient nursing staff and the right number of staff across all disciplines. We will create a stable and capable workforce through forward-thinking recruitment and retention strategies. The increasing staffing and funding demands on the NHS emphasise the growing need for the Trust to be more flexible and creative in how we recruit and retain staff. Part of this will mean enhancing existing roles, improving the skills mix on wards and looking at different ways of working to be more responsive to local patient and population needs.
Furthermore, we need to change to way we work across professions, specialisms and how we partner with other organisations to deliver integrated care and clinical pathways.
Key priorities…
One key priority is ensuring that we have compassionate, inclusive and highly visible leaders who empower and enable staff and exemplify our values. We are committed to embedding strong management skills amongst our managers to develop them to lead through engagement and improvement.
To retain our staff and develop a sustainable portfolio of outstanding services we will encourage learning as part of every role in our organisation, ensuring opportunities are fairly accessible to all staff. We will create new opportunities for staff to develop their skills and their careers with us. We will support every member of staff to play an active part in an improvement or innovation initiative; we recognise that we need to learn from what doesn’t work as much as by what does work in order to be effective.
Advances in technology open up new possibilities for prevention, care and treatment. These advances will transform the way we deliver healthcare. We need to build the capability of our staff in order to build a digitally confident workforce that is fit for the future.
Meeting the challenges…
To meet the challenges of the next ten years we will embrace the talents of all our staff and we are committed to building an inclusive culture where all staff feel free from discrimination, violence, bullying and harassment. We aim to create a workforce which reflects the citizens of the UK and the community we serve and we are committed to achieving the target representation for Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) and female staff at senior levels.
This strategy plays a critical role in supporting a work culture that enables a healthy, safe and engaging working environment for all our staff. We recognize the value of fostering a supportive work environment, where staff feel engaged, motivated, encouraged and supported and we will report on this publicly and act to do better. Central to this is the mental health and well-being of our staff, which is as much of a priority to the Trust as great patient care. We commit to making the Trust a better place to work through increasing flexible working and improving the work life balance of our staff.
Strategic themes…
The people strategy seven strategic themes will underpin the organization strategy, the three strategic goals and the values and behaviours. The achievement of each of the seven themes will be a 3 to 5-year journey. For each strategic theme we have outlined the vision, alignment to the strategic objectives, area of focus and year one priorities and deliverables for 2023.
These seven strategic themes are as follows:
- Development of a sustainable workforce
- Remote, flexible and agile working
- Immediate Manager Programme
- Equality, Diversity and Inclusion
- Health, well-being and workplace safety
- Values and Behaviours and Managing Conflict
- NW London system working
