The overarching aim of the Workforce, Training and Education (WTE) directorate within NHS England is to ensure the healthcare system has a sufficient and inclusive workforce with the knowledge, skills, values and behaviours to deliver compassionate, high-quality health and care to the people it serves.

Formerly as part of Health Education England (HEE) and now as part of NHS England, the WTE analytics function provides high-quality data resources, collections, analysis and analytical products to NHS users related to workforce and education insights.

Insights for a Changing System

The NHS’ establishment of Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) in July 2022 came with evolving requirements for them to better understand their health care workforces and education pipelines. With these systemic changes, HEE identified that the system needed a way to access their existing workforce planning intelligence and expert knowledge in a more considered way. HEE needed something that that would prevent multiple local reporting solutions proliferating, while supporting the principles of building “once for all” and seeking a single source of the truth across the system.

Key to the solution would be the ability to offer a better presented and accessible connection to the existing expert analysis and insights, while also allowing for product ranges to be curated for different audiences. The platform needed to maintain a connection to HEE’s well-established Tableau and data infrastructure to minimise duplication and reduce burden. Finally the solution needed to be easy to install, fast to develop and agile enough to continually adapt.

Creating the Ideal Analytics Presentation Layer

After evaluating a number of options, the WTE analytics team chose Curator by InterWorks to provide easy access to existing and new Tableau products. Curator integrated with the organisation’s mature Tableau infrastructure and gave the team a simple, zero-code way to develop their existing products and present them to the new audience. The resulting platform is the NHS England Workforce Intelligence Portal. By helping HEE to quickly build an engaging and flexible user experience, Curator improved the quality and consistency of workforce information for their key users and stakeholders.

Enthusiastic Engagement

Since launching the Portal the analytical team has rolled out three phases of products to users. Requests for access have steadily increased and the platform now has thousands of active users, constituting an increasingly large proportion of overall users of the data service.

“Though originally targeted at ICSs, there is now engagement with the portal from across the NHS. Engagement with users indicates their enthusiasm with what has been delivered and an audience keen to help the team develop the service and products further.”

– Tom Inkelaar, Senior Manager, NHS England