Group of people involved in creating the United Surrey Talent Strategy

A new approach to developing a sustainable workforce.

Ensuring we build and retain a sustainable workforce is one of the greatest challenges facing health and care organisations today. The health and social care sector faces a range of difficult issues such as high demand for services, high waiting times, falling staff retention and satisfaction, a difficult labour market, declining public satisfaction and a worsening financial environment.

We need to do something different if we are to achieve our ambitious vision and increase our focus on population health and ill health prevention, as well as providing high quality, sustainable services.

So, it is time for something new. Working together across health, social care, local government, the voluntary, community and faith sectors as well as education, we have co-designed an innovative new strategy ‘United Surrey Talent.’ 

Our aim? To unite Surrey talent across health, care and the voluntary, community and faith sectors, which is enabled, mobile and skilled to serve others during fulfilled careers.

At its heart is a ‘united team’ approach, aiming to share talent and expertise across partners and sectors. Whilst we have no magic wand and cannot control everything, we do believe many solutions lie within our collective gift if we work together differently. For example, turnover in the care sector is nearly 40%, with little recognition of the value these roles bring, low job security and currently no co-ordinated support for career advancement.  We also struggle with too few registered nurses, but we do not make use of the nursing associate role, despite nursing support recruitment consistently over-achieving.  We have the opportunity to grow our own. 

Making this all work better requires scale and with so many partner organisations being small or medium businesses, we can help everyone by clubbing together and sharing resources.

Our approach has six key levers for the coming years:

  1. To modernise and integrate recruitment
  2. Building new capabilities – such as a new Health & Social Care Academy for learning and education
  3. Developing fulfilling careers
  4. Establishing a ‘Surrey offer’, levelling up staff experience, and finding ways of helping more staff with affordable accommodation
  5. To ‘enable’ the United Surrey Team – supporting a one-team approach
  6. Building our expertise