Diagnostic tool helps record wellbeing offers across a system

Mid and South Essex Health and Care Partnership is helping organisations across the Integrated Care System use the Health and Wellbeing Framework

What we’ve done

Who we are

Mid and South Essex Health and Care Partnership is an Integrated Care System (ICS) made up of 179 GP practices, community, mental health, social care and hospital services supporting around 1.2 million people. We have over 44,000 staff, including 26,000 in social care and 12,000 in secondary care.

What we did

We are testing how to apply the Health and Wellbeing Framework to support culture change. This aligns with our integrated Health and Care Workforce Strategy which has culture change and developing compassionate leadership as key strands.

We invited all Trusts to use the Framework’s diagnostic tool to document their health and wellbeing offers. Once each organisation has completed the tool individually, we will compile themes across the ICS to identify shared issues and gaps.

We chose this approach after meeting with the health and wellbeing leads from all trusts to discuss priority areas to tackle. We decided to use the diagnostic tool as a whole rather than selecting one or two themes because we didn’t have a clear sense of where our major gaps were and whether there was consistency across organisations. We broke the process into manageable stages, asking trusts to concentrate on completing one element of the diagnostic tool per month, then discussing that element before moving on to look at another section.

Using the Health and Wellbeing Framework provides a consistent approach to assessing needs across the system. The diagnostic tool draws together existing evidence and provides a useful way of understanding what is currently on offer and what is not.

However, the tool is not a substitute for talking with staff. It is a way of compiling information, not an end in itself. Our trusts did not have a lot of evidence about Band 2, 3 and 4 staff, for instance, so leads spoke to staff in these Bands directly to understand their needs. The diagnostic tool helped us identify this evidence gap to fill.