Allied health professionals job planning: a best practice guide

Advice for trusts to ensure that their approach to job planning for allied health professionals (AHPs) is consistent with best practice.

Job planning is an important way to link best use of resources with quality outcomes for patients and is a useful element in service redesign. By documenting professional activity in job plans, you can better understand your workforce capacity and match it to patients’ needs.

When this is combined with e-rostering software, you can effectively plan and deploy your workforce — achieving the productivity gains described in Lord Carter’s reports on unwarranted variation (in acute hospitals and in mental health and community health services), and meet the National Quality Board’s expectations on safe, sustainable and productive staffing.

It is important to recognise that digitising job plans allows for greater transparency and efficiency. However, time allocations and the content of an individual’s job plan can be agreed before software is in place. This guide will support AHP services to introduce job planning with or without software.

This resource supplements national workforce guidance — Levels of attainment and meaningful use standards for e-rostering and e-job planning — and it replaces the AHP job planning guide we published in 2017. This guidance is relevant for all AHPs irrespective of which sector they work in.

Our tools

This template helps to support the calculation of clinical capacity for AHP teams and services and is provided for your optional use to support the implementation of job planning for AHP services that do not have software in place.

Case study

This case study details how Ipswich Hospital has improved its AHP clinical capacity by implementing job planning, ensuring the right skills are in the right place at the right time, meeting high patient demand, providing better quality care and allowing staff to develop both personally and professionally.

If you have any questions about AHP job planning, please contact nhsi.ahp-productivity@nhs.net.