Building the workforce

Details on the Knowledge and Library Services' (KLS) recommendations for expanding the specialist workforce in the NHS organisations.

Building the specialist workforce required

Health Education England (HEE) has an active workforce development work-stream for this specialised workforce. Tailored continuing professional development focuses on up-skilling today’s library workforce in mobilising evidence and knowledge.

To build the talent pipeline, the national team meets regularly with HEIs that offer courses in knowledge management and library science.

HEE has taken a lead role in shaping the new health librarianship module within the Library and Information management Masters at Manchester Metropolitan.

The team is in discussion with other education providers. The team also encourages a research perspective on these emerging roles.

Discussion

HEE’s analysis demonstrates that library and knowledge services with better staff ratios are more able to work proactively with a wider range of healthcare teams to enable evidencebased decision-making impacting on treatment options and the quality of patient care as well as impacting on productivity gains and cost improvement and the spread of innovation.

The analysis has decisively demonstrated the relevance of staff ratios:

• knowledge services with fewer qualified staff per workforce headcount are challenged to meet the 90% minimum compliance threshold defined in Libararies Quality Assurance Framework (LQAF)
• where there is greater capacity than the current average staffing ratio of 1 qualified librarian or knowledge specialist per 1,730 WTE healthcare workforce, we see greater compliance with the LQAF standards and greater reporting of positive impacts on healthcare

The data shows that NHS is not yet positioned to optimise the emerging roles of embedded librarians, knowledge specialists and knowledge managers within the skill-mix of multidisciplinary clinical and managerial teams.

The very best staffed NHS library and knowledge services lack capacity to reach all the teams whose patients and staff would benefit from their contribution. There is insufficient capacity to incorporate these roles within teams to inform evidence-based improvement in care, the spread of innovation, improved productivity and cost savings.

The introduction of a recommended staff ratio is a key action by HEE to enable individual organisations to identify and address that risk.