Health Business

As the professional voice of human resources in healthcare across all four countries of the UK, the Healthcare People Management Association (HPMA) maintains and develops the people management contribution to healthcare. Supported by a 10 strong branch network, the association sets and promotes the highest standards in people management in healthcare.
    
The HPMA operates primarily on a corporate membership basis, with over 160 trusts across England, Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland totalling over 2,500 members. It aims to make association membership a career must for any HR practitioner working in healthcare, and it passionately believes that HPMA has a great contribution to make to healthcare itself. Members receive the highest level of support in the most important public service.

Membership benefits
HPMA Membership offers personal and professional development by:

• providing an annual subscription to  ‘Network’, the HPMA’s monthly e-magazine

• offering a professional network for members including private healthcare and specialist consultancies

• providing preferential access to tailored education and learning

• taking part in local and national events and conferences

• taking part in research and benefiting from shared good practice

• responding to contemporary people management issues in healthcare

• responding to the needs of you, the members

• offering you a louder voice in contributing to national policy

• supporting HPMA in supporting the sector, by helping to maintain the voice of healthcare people management across the UK.

Currently led by president Deborah O’Dea, HR director, St Mary’s NHS Trust, and supported by executive officer Alex O’Grady and a council team, HPMA plays a critical part in the delivery of the health and NHS agendas. With good relationships with the health departments in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, with NHS employers and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, HPMA occupies a unique position as a professional association in the changing health arena. Readers may be familiar with previous incarnations – NASPHO or AHHRM - as we have been an important player in the health landscape for over thirty years.
    
Our well established conferences and awards programme are important events in the calendar, driven by HR for HR and celebrating its diverse constituency.

New workstreams
Recent times in the NHS have been testing for members and for HPMA, but it has emerged as a modern, more business-like organisation. Aside from incorporation, one of the key impacts to membership has been the development of four new workstreams: Just in time; Award winning ideas; People and money; and HR development.
    
In working for members the HPMA is addressing one of its greatest concerns: the lack of HR development opportunities within the service today. In perhaps the most important of our new workstreams – HR development – HPMA and its partners are supporting members to realise their potential (and the potential of the role itself) at each stage of the career pathway.
    
The association has identified four development steps:
Stage 1 - HR Graduate Trainee (or equivalent) to HR Manager
Stage 2 - HR Manager to Deputy HR Director
Stage 3 - Deputy HR Director to Board Level HR Director
Stage 4 - Board Level HR Director to Chief Executive

At each level the HPMA is seeking to plug the gap between transactional HR and transformational HR. Our aim is to enable HR professionals at each level to interact and influence with the ‘business’ of health, for instance dealing with talent, succession planning, corporate responsibility and productivity.
    
HR needs to drive business success; our challenge is to operate effectively on the broader agenda, not just direct on workforce issues.

Project work
The new NHS agenda, restructuring, service redesign, working with new providers, more explicit performance targets means that HR working is more project-based than ever before. There is far more outsourcing and fewer traditional transactional roles.
    
Trusts must now work more closely with local government, the third sector and other service providers such as supermarkets. These changes call for a whole community approach, to improve the concept of citizen ‘wellness’. And HR should recognise and respond with community engagement.

From the patient’s viewpoint
At the heart of HPMA’s work will always be the desire to achieve measurable outcomes that make a difference to patient care. HR has a platform at the very centre of the service to affect change. HR practitioners need to step up and to look through a wider lens – a patient’s lens.
    
The overarching theme for the People and money workstream is the improvement of working relations between trust finance and HR teams. Poor communication between these professional groups was identified in the Health Select Committee on workforce planning as a major failing. Encouraging better understanding and integration is a priority for HPMA.

Productivity
But where will we start? One of the hardest questions for healthcare trusts to answer is: How productive is your organisation? It seems that many colleagues have worked on quantifying productivity but there is no universal model or series of measures adopted by the healthcare community as a whole to answer that question.
    
With the launch event in the People and money workstream, HPMA sets out help trusts answer just that question. Joined by PriceWaterhouseCoopers and supported by its brother organisation Healthcare Finance Management Association (HFMA), it is engaging groups of HR and finance professionals to develop a model or series of measures to define trust productivity.
    
The event programme will begin with a pilot workshop in Wales with five trusts. These volunteer trusts will complete a data questionnaire (e.g. personnel employed in each service division, agency spend, mortality rates) that will provide data sets that can be used to test existing models and measures of productivity.
    
Facilitated by PWC, the finance and HR contributors from the pilot trusts will debate and evaluate current productivity models and measures – identifying trends, anomalies, benefits and failures. The aim of the one-day workshop will be to develop or accept a productivity measure or series of measurements that are fit for purpose.
    
In the second phase of the programme, the outcomes of the pilot event will be shared with the wider HPMA and HFMA membership at a seminar event. It is hoped that this event will provide an opportunity to recruit trust volunteers for workshop events across the UK to further develop the model and its applications in Northern Ireland, Scotland and England.

Finding solutions
The Just in time workstream provides practical solutions to today’s problems, to reduce workload while maintaining and implementing the highest possible professional standards. By opting to use half-day workshops, members have found the events not just as the help we intended, but also as great development and networking opportunities.
    
And the Just in time brand is growing: virtually every organisation who attended the first on the disability discrimination act, enrolled at least one, if not two of their team, on second gender equality event. HPMA aims to establish Just in time and expand the product with events across the UK this autumn, using local partnerships between commercial
members and branches.
    
Finally, the Award winning ideas workstream looks to celebrate and share the outstanding projects and good practice that the association’s annual Excellence in HR Management Awards programme highlights. Recent winners such as West London Mental Health NHS Trust’s Cultural competency toolkit and Barts & The London NHS Trust HRConsult set the standard for HR practice worldwide, innovations that the HPMA rightly want to publicise as widely as possible.
    
The HR profession in health care is a strong and confident community which is committed to leading success in the improvement of services to patients. The HPMA is proud of its many achievements and courageous in meeting the challenges ahead.

For more information
Address: Gothic House, 3 The Green
Richmond, TW9 1PL
Phone: 020 8334 4530 Fax: 020 8334 4531
Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
Website: www.hpma.org.uk