IT services: consulting, software development, Internet and support

Tender description

Led by Scottish Government, the Nursing and Midwifery Workload and Workforce Planning Programme (NMWWPP) develops and maintains a suite of workload and workforce planning tools to support evidence based decision making when setting nursing and midwifery staffing levels in a variety of care settings in Scotland. The Programme also provides support to localities in using the tools in the form of training and consultancy. A dedicated team within the Public Health Intelligence (PHI) unit of NSS provides analytical support to the Programme. For clarity this PIN is in no way related to the current NSS/NES eRostering procurement. Led by Scottish Government, the Nursing and Midwifery Workload and Workforce Planning Programme (NMWWPP) develops and maintains a suite of workload and workforce planning tools to support evidence based decision making when setting nursing and midwifery staffing levels in a variety of care settings in Scotland. The Programme also provides support to localities in using the tools in the form of training and consultancy. A dedicated team within the Public Health Intelligence (PHI) unit of NSS provides analytical support to the Programme. Use of the tools was made mandatory for NHS Boards in 2012 but more recently the SG launched the Health and Care (Staffing) (Scotland) Bill, with the intention of placing a greater legal requirement on Boards and care services to ensure appropriate numbers of suitably trained staff are in place, irrespective of where care is received. This is likely to lead to a greater need to maintain the validity of existing tools as models of care evolve as well as to develop new tools for care settings not covered by the existing tool suite. When developing or revising a new tool, a key part of the process is to perform observation studies within examples of the relevant care setting. An observation study is where staff activities in that setting are observed and recorded along with information on the patients being cared for. Typically, these observations are carried out every ten minutes for multiple members of staff on duty. The current process is entirely based on paper which has limitations in terms of information governance, data quality and the time and resources used to collate, analyse and report on the data. In partnership with Scottish Government, NSS are exploring the possibility of procuring a digital solution that could be used to support these studies with the objective of ensuring all aspects of a study are performed electronically including study design, set–up, data capture and data quality assurance. This soft market test is being conducted to determine whether a suitable solution may be available, to determine the scope of any future procurement and to ascertain indicative costs.