Strategic Workforce Modelling and Analysis at NHS Wales: Towards a Strategic Digital Twin of the Welsh Healthcare Workforce

Health Education and Improvement Wales (HEIW) is the strategic workforce body for NHS Wales. HEIW makes a valuable contribution to addressing strategic and specialist workforce issues, making Wales a great place to train and work for health and care staff and maximising the contribution of all professions and occupations through statutory functions. As part of HEIW’s Workforce Strategy, Planning, and Intelligence function the HEIW Analytics team produces a range of workforce information and workforce modelling at a national and sub national level for NHS Wales. Workforce demand and supply modelling helps to support planning decisions that contribute to meeting patient needs and helps to investigate if current recruitment and retention will be sufficient to enable future demand to be met. HEIW have collaborated with Decision Analysis Services to develop a generic strategic workforce model to enable the rapid generation of national workforce demand and supply projections to support the strategic workforce planning. This is the first step towards developing a strategic digital twin of the Welsh healthcare workforce.