Workforce Priority Setting Process
This project is a priority setting process (PSP) in association with the James Lind Alliance. The aim of the SURGE workforce PSP is to work with stakeholders to identify and prioritise research questions on workforce sustainability, with a focus on recruitment, retention, staff wellbeing and job satisfaction.
The objectives are to:
- Work with the same day, urgent and emergency care workforce, patients, and carers to identify uncertainties within the sector which have not been addressed by existing research. This may also include service planners.
- Agree by consensus a prioritised list of those uncertainties to guide the direction of research.
- Publicise the results of the PSP and process.
- Share these results with research commissioning bodies to be considered for funding decisions and with researchers to drive research into these areas.
We will use multiple strategies to ensure we involve a diverse staff group with lived experiences, including but not limited to older workers, those with disability, workforce representing the global majority, people with caring responsibilities, (peri) menopausal women (Cis and Trans), staff who identify as LGBTQI+ and staff with neurodiversity.
Participants will be recruited via our extensive range of regional and national networks. Based on our work to date, likely areas include integration of staff into multidisciplinary teams for optimal efficiency; investigating acceptability, equity, safety, costs and consequences, as well as opportunities for, career development (e.g. clinical and extended leadership opportunities); and the impact these all have on job satisfaction, productivity, wellbeing, recruitment, and retention.
We will use a survey and a combination of in-person and online workshops to identify a list of questions that the workforce and members of the public have about this topic.
We will then use a second survey to identify priorities for research in these questions. We will decide the final list of unanswered questions in priority order at an in-person priority setting workshop facilitated by an advisor from the James Lind Alliance. This study will run until August 2026 as part of the wider SURGE partnership.
