Countess of Chester Hospital transforms workforce planning to support sustainable care

Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has successfully completed a medical workforce planning programme, by pioneering a data-driven programme in partnership with workforce optimisation specialists, SARD.

The comprehensive exercise has unlocked trust-wide clarity of capacity and demand to inform safe, efficient and sustainable patient care for over 420,000 people living in Chester and West Cheshire.

Over eight months, SARD helped the trust to complete 285 detailed consultant jobs plans which provided unprecedented clarity of clinical capacity and enabled the trust to model demand across 18 key services.

The extensive work means the trust is fully engaged on job planning across the entire clinical workforce.

Critical insight has informed service re-design and reassigning of resources. This has helped to identify where the trust needs to address gaps in under-resourced services, and rebalancing in other areas.

The ambitious programme was launched in response to rising service demand and an ageing population whose increasingly complex care needs require a more agile and sustainable workforce strategy.

Key milestones throughout the project also included a full diagnostics review of existing jobs plans, data and processes; creating a revised job planning policy, the implementation of SARD’s e-job planning platform; standardised job planning language across the trust and establishing a multi-stakeholder Consistency Panel.

More than 120 one-to-one sessions and speciality workshops ensured clinicians were fully engaged, informed, and supported throughout the process.

Completion of the programme has supported Countess of Chester to potentially reach level 3 of attainment levels for medical job planning set by NHS England and is aligned to NHS England’s new 10-step approach to job planning, issued in 2025.

This places the trust among the top trusts in the country with data from the 2025 Workforce Deployment System Survey showing only 32 per cent of trusts are at level 1 or above.

Dr Nigel Scawn, medical director at Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, said: “By piecing job planning information together to create a full picture of capacity and demand, we can ensure resources are sufficiently balanced and distributed across clinical areas to support safer and more effective care.

“The strong collaborative working with the medical workforce has enabled us to establish a robust, consistent and transparent process which has repositioned job planning from a compliance task to a powerful strategic asset to drive informed decisions.”

Phil Bottle, managing director at SARD, said: “Countess of Chester set out to fundamentally reshape its approach to planning, deploying and understanding its medical workforce capacity.

“They have set a new standard for workforce transformation by embedding job planning as a lasting optimisation solution that supports real workforce and service decisions.

“Longer term, the trusts that adopt workforce optimisation as core infrastructure and not a siloed exercise will thrive as the NHS responds to increasing demand and complex needs.”  

The workforce strategy at the Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is part of an overall improvement programme across the trust, focusing on improved care for patients and families and a greater emphasis on staff wellbeing.

The trust has three hospitals – The Countess of Chester Hospital, Ellesmere Port Hospital and Tarporley War Memorial Hospital.