Treating people as assets, not costs: An economic case for workforce planning

Summary

In this article published by Economics By Design, Colin Lewry and Jacque Mallender argue that, despite recent history, treating healthcare staff as a cost and not an asset needs to be reversed when developing workforce plans and approaches in 2022.

Content

Currently, many organisations and systems that we have worked with are seeing staff as a cost. Requests to hire staff are scrutinised and blocked, vacancies are seen as a way of reducing overspends and capacity plans to recover backlogs are essentially just plans to “sweat the assets”. As well as damaging the staff experience and damaging service-user outcomes, this is leading to the opposite of what it intends – an increased cost to serve. Systems and organisations need to build in time for training, upskilling and nurturing staff when developing workforce plans in a world of rising demand levels – and view staff as an asset by measuring their impact on the service, not their cost.

This will be done in four ways:

1. Demonstrating the economic value of the health workforce.

2. Investing in real, appreciative leadership from the front-line, down to central departments.

3. Dual Transformation: Empowering staff to innovate to solve problems while the big redesigns are happening.

4. Defining the rules of working in an era of high activity.