Training and Conferences: School Health Workforce

School Health - a vital topic. But how do you justify spend on school nurses, when their impact won't be felt for years? NHS Employers' Large Scale Workforce Change group commissioned me to train sites in development of an evaluation and benefits realisation methodology, and then to use it . .

We ran a series of conferences bringing the 19 pilot site teams together, and I coached teams between times. Each had decided what new project they wanted to run, often without much research, and had received their funding.
We pulled together stakeholders from NHS, local authority, education, the public, and examined the needs in more detail. We compared the needs to the current staffing, provision and resources, and performed a Gap Analysis. We looked at the resources given by NHS Employers, and in most cases the stakeholders were able to make executive decisions to invest more, now that they knew where the money was going, what the targets were, and what those targets meant in terms of return on investment.
The teams then planned the milestones and the way they'd monitor achievement of those milestones. Suddenly, there was real enthusiasm - this wasn't just another boost of central funding that got lost in the NHS organisation's accounts, the project team themselves had set targets and had them endorsed by the stakeholders and programme board.
With milestones, reporting and monitoring, and team commitment, things moved apace and many very successful changes were delivered.