Workforce inclusion and innovation for impact
Supporting inclusive and innovative workforce transformation to improve health and care delivery in a wide range of communities.
About this research theme
To deliver fair and effective health and social care, we need to rethink how care is delivered. This includes looking at where care is provided, and who provides it.
Our work will develop evidence to support large‑scale, inclusive, sustainable workforce change, helping to improve outcomes for communities that currently experience the greatest inequalities.
Our research programme will deliver work across three core strategic areas
- Area 1: Who? Developing inclusive workforces and workplaces
This work is about who works in health and social care, and how to make the workforce more inclusive, diverse and representative. We want to make sure a wider mix of people are involved in health and care. This includes health and care research.
That means encouraging involvement from a wide range of professions, backgrounds and communities, so that care and research reflect real‑world experiences.
We’ll also test initiatives that help make workplaces more inclusive. For example, programmes that support people with long‑term mental health issues, learning disabilities, or ethnically minoritised women to stay in work.
We’ll also deliver work to understand what supports staff stay in their roles, especially in areas with low levels of staff retention and higher levels of unemployment.
- Area 2: Where? Workforce innovation to deliver for under-served communities
This work will look at how to design new ways of working that meet the needs of people in underserved places, such as rural, coastal, and disadvantaged communities. This will include testing new community‑based ways of working to deliver services and improve staff retention.
- Area 3: How? Understanding large-scale workforce transformation
This work will look at how large, system‑wide workforce change happens, especially when care is being delivered in the community. Our work aims to collect evidence on what is working, what isn’t, and why, then share that learning at scale to drive forward successful change and improvement. To support this, we will develop a national workforce research partnership, which will support us to share expertise and learning, quickly.
Supporting work across all research themes
This is a ‘cross-cutting’ research theme, which means we will support and amplify workforce-related research within the other ARC NENC research themes, providing expertise, broadening reach, and enabling knowledge to be shared more effectively.
