Workforce is the most critical factor to the successful delivery of high-quality health and social care. The Barking and Dagenham, Havering and Redbridge Partnership faces significant workforce challenges.

As a partnership, we collectively employ over 33,000 people, many of whom live locally; in context, nearly 1 in 20 people who live in BHR work for the NHS or a Local Authority. This number doesn’t include the thousands who work for private care companies and the community and voluntary sector.

In the context of collaborative working, making best use of resource, and the need to innovatively address workforce challenges across our patch, BHR Partners are seeking to establish a Barking and Dagenham, Havering and Redbridge Health and Care Academy (BHR HCA).

This will cover the BHR Integrated Care Partnership footprint and further afield, in line with our partner organisation footprints. This is in line with the key national drivers for workforce transformation, including the aspirations of the NHS Long Term Plan, London Race Strategy, and the plans for statutory changes to formalise integration between health and care partners by 2022.

The BHR Health and Social Care Academy will build on and align the significant number of workforce initiatives already underway across the system, bringing them together, identifying and addressing key gaps, and working with the BHR Transformation Boards and Borough Partnerships to drive the workforce initiatives required to deliver their transformation programmes.

The BHR Health and Care Academy will seek to; promote education, learning and training; improve recruitment and retention; and build human resources management and leadership capability and capacity.  As an Anchor organisation we aim to ‘grow our own’ workforce, offering careers for young people which improve health and wellbeing outcomes.

NHS Trusts and Local Authorities also have, as Anchor Organisations, a responsibility to support a greater number of local people into rewarding careers in health and care, something which, collectively through the BHR Health and Social Care Academy, we can achieve.