Digital Job Planning to Improve Workforce Visibility and Engagement

From compliance to confidence: embedding digital job planning as a foundation for workforce visibility and service planning.

Summary

Whittington Health NHS Trust is an integrated care organisation, providing hospital and community services across North London to a population of around 500,000 people.

The Trust has transformed digital job planning from a low-adoption, low-assurance process into a core component of workforce governance and service planning.

After implementing RLDatix JobPlan in 2017, the Trust initially struggled to drive adoption, with electronic job plan approval rates initially measured at around 7%. Through a sustained programme of engagement, governance, training and system optimisation, Whittington Health increased electronic medical job plan compliance to 98% by 2025, exceeding the NHS England national target of 95%.

At the time of its RLDatix Awards 2025 submission, Whittington Health ranked number one in England for job planning compliance within the RLDatix database. More importantly, job planning is now viewed not as ‘just another administrative burden’, but as a reliable source of insight into clinical capacity, supporting more informed decision-making across services.

As Associate Medical Director for Workforce, Dr. Sola Makinde explains:

“This has been a five‑year journey, not a one‑year fix. What’s changed is that job planning is now everyday work, not something extra that people try to get through.”

Dr. Sola Makinde
Associate Medical Director for Workforce, Whittington Health NHS Trust

The challenge

Electronic job planning plays a critical role in helping NHS organisations understand workforce capacity, align clinical activity to service demand and demonstrate assurance over how clinician time is used.

Despite adopting RLDatix JobPlan in 2017, Whittington Health faced significant challenges in the early years of implementation. Initial attempts were led through short-term project support, but ownership, consistency and confidence in the process were limited.

In 2019, compliance with electronic job planning remained extremely low, and an internal audit provided no assurance over job planning processes.

As Sola recalls:

“We had an internal audit report that showed no assurance in the job planning process. That was the reality of where we were.”

Dr. Sola Makinde
Associate Medical Director for Workforce, Whittington Health NHS Trust

Several factors contributed to this situation:

• Limited digital adoption across the medical workforce
• Unclear ownership of the process
• Inconsistent understanding of contracts and tariffs
• Concerns from clinicians about whether job planning accurately reflected their work or pay
• A lack of trust that engaging with the system would lead to meaningful outcomes

The COVID-19 pandemic further disrupted early improvement efforts and delayed full, prospective job planning cycles, resulting in limited visibility of the programmed activities of the medical workforce.

The approach

Beginning in 2020, the Trust reset its approach by establishing a dedicated Job Planning function, combining operational capability with strong clinical sponsorship.

Melissa Kamara, initially based in the Programme Management Office (PMO), was appointed to lead the job planning implementation alongside the Chief Medical Officer and Associate Medical Director. She subsequently left the PMO and joined the Medical Directorate to continue this work.

Rather than treating job planning as a technical rollout, the focus shifted to building capability, trust and governance around the system. The team set out to improve both the quality of the job plans and increase the rates with each subsequent job planning cycle.

Capability and skills

A key early insight was the importance of having the right skill mix leading the programme.

As Melissa explains:

“You need someone who understands the data and the system, but also someone who can translate what clinicians are saying into job‑planning language.”

Melissa Kamara
Operations and Productivity Lead, Medical Workforce, Whittington Health NHS Trust

This capability allowed the team to:

• Rapidly build expertise in RLDatix JobPlan
• Resolve technical and usability issues
• Support clinicians in translating real work into accurate job plans

A strong digital foundation

The team focused first on getting the basics right:

• Creating user accounts for 100% of eligible medical staff
• Publishing job plans for all doctors with prospective dates
• Running 100% prospective job planning cycles each financial year

This ensured the Trust was no longer working from partial or outdated information.

Governance and consistency

Alongside this, Whittington introduced formal governance structures to bring consistency and assurance into the process. These included:

• Co-authoring a robust Trust-wide job planning policy
• Standardising activity descriptions and organisational tariffs
• Introducing a digital declaration of interests aligned to national guidance

Melissa adds: “Having a really robust job planning policy was critical. When there are disagreements, it gives you something clear to refer back to, and that makes things a lot easier.”

Engagement and behavioural change

The programme placed sustained emphasis on engagement:

• Annual job planning training programmes
• Group sessions and one-to-one support
• Regular check-ins with divisional clinical leaders
• Active executive sponsorship from the CMO and COO

Senior leadership involvement proved essential in shifting behaviour and accelerating sign-off, as Sola explains:

“What pushed us from around 75% to 98% was senior leadership being visibly involved and helping clinical leaders unblock issues.”

Dr. Sola Makinde
Associate Medical Director for Workforce, Whittington Health NHS Trust

Compliance and assurance

Over five years, the Trust achieved a dramatic increase in digital job planning adoption:

• Job plan approval increased from 7% to 98%
• The Trust exceeded the 95% NHS England national target
• Whittington Health ranked No.1 in England for job planning compliance within the RLDatix database

Over successive job planning cycles:

• Compliance increased by +27% and +24% across two cycles
• Training sessions required dropped by 63%
• One-to-one support requests reduced by 44%

As confidence grew, reliance on intensive support reduced, indicating that job planning had become embedded as routine business.

Greater visibility of workforce capacity

With consistent and complete job plans in place, the Trust now has clear visibility of programmed activity across the medical workforce.

Departments can see:

• How Direct Clinical Care, Supporting Professional Activities and additional roles are distributed
• Where capacity exists for clinics, theatres and teaching
• Where inconsistencies or gaps require escalation or discussion

Monthly progress meetings, supported by job planning data, enable clinical leaders to actively manage sign-off and address bottlenecks during planning cycles.

Stronger governance and data quality

Improved data quality has also strengthened governance processes.

Examples include:

• Increased reporting of private practice and fee-paying activity following conflict-of-interest audits
• A 41% increase in recorded undergraduate medical education activity following system improvements

Melissa explains, “Once we had more consistent data, it really helped improve the reporting and move us on to the next stage.”

Expanding beyond the medical workforce

The success of the programme has enabled Whittington Health to extend digital job planning beyond doctors.

In 2024, Melissa was asked to lead implementation for the Allied Health Professional (AHP) workforce.

At the outset:

• 591 AHP user accounts existed
• 286 had no published job plan
• Only 4% were fully signed off

Following data cleansing, system reconfiguration and targeted training:

• Compliance increased to 79% (423 of 537 job plans)
• First-level sign-off reached 82%
• The programme included 19 training sessions and tailored one-to-one support

This work has broadened workforce visibility beyond the medical workforce and laid the groundwork for more integrated clinical workforce planning.

Learning and confidence

For Whittington Health, the most significant shift has been a change in mindset.

Job planning is no longer perceived as a bureaucratic exercise, but as a trusted foundation for understanding workforce capacity and aligning it to service need.

As Sola adds, “We’ve got to a point where job planning is everyday work. It’s organisational and behavioural change.”

Where divisions actively engage with the process, there is clearer ownership, stronger governance and improved ability to identify and act on issues.

A foundation for the future

Getting to high compliance mattered, but it enabled much wider work around planning and use of the data. This has shifted job planning from a reporting requirement into a practical input for ongoing workforce and service decisions.

With a stable, trusted job planning dataset in place, Whittington Health is now focused on using this information to support:

• Demand and capacity modelling
• Service and workforce planning
• Improved alignment between clinical availability and patient care delivery

As Sola reflects: “Getting to high-quality, compliant job plans was really just the starting point for us.”

The programme demonstrates that successful digital job planning requires time, perseverance and sustained leadership. When done well, it provides a scalable foundation for better workforce insight, stronger governance and more informed service planning across the organisation.