NHS Staff Council Knowledge and Skills Framework Group (KSFG)

The Knowledge and Skills Framework Group was originally formed to develop KSF. Its work has now progressed towards supporting employers in implementing both the KSF and the new Personal Development Review (PDR) system. As one of the healthcare scientist representatives on NHS Employers Assembly, I was recently invited to join this group. KSFG is composed of an equal balance of management and staff side members. My role is primarily to represent healthcare scientists as a whole, although to some extent I also represent my employer, National Blood Service and other Special Health Authorities.

KSFG is monitoring implementation primarily through the e-ksf, the electronic tool developed to record KSF outlines and their use in PDRs and Personal Development Plans. Early in January this year NHS Employers sent out a document to all employers describing a more comprehensive system of monitoring implementation of KSF than has been done up to now (see reference 1). The new reporting requirements will include outcomes of gateway reviews and will distinguish between staff who pass through by providing evidence of knowledge and skills required, from those who pass through by default, usually because the employer has been unable to release them for the development opportunities required.

Another function of KSFG is to review posts submitted to the National Library of KSF outlines. Around 50% are sent back for further work! Good outlines are put into the National Library and are available to all NHS staff to look at. The National Library has some excellent examples (and some which are not so good). Common problems with outlines submitted include examples of application which are not specific enough (it is not clear what evidence would be produced) and examples of application which do not support the indicators at that level.

KSFG is currently developing their workplan to March 2007. Contrary to some rumours KSF is not going away! It is likely it will be tied into the new Electronic Staff Record System (ESR) when that finally goes live.

If you have any points you would like to raise with this group, please contact me by email (firstname.secondname @ nbs.nhs.uk).

Reference:
Monitoring the NHS Knowledge and Skills Framework. January 2006. NHS Staff Council & NHS Employers.

Lessons learned from using the KSF

By now most NHS staff will have a KSF outline for their post and should have also had a first review against that outline to identify personal development needs to go in a PDP. It has been recognised though that not all employers are using full outlines, with Foundation Subsets and examples of application for both full and foundation outlines. So what exactly should a full KSF outline contain?

The examples of application in a full KSF outline should make it possible for the reader to work out what a job entails and what it contributes to the service. A common mistake is to rely on directly copying and pasting examples of application from the NHS KSF handbook, but these are far too generic. For example, if a jobholder communicates with patients in order to reassure them about the process of having a diagnostic test carried out, including this will make it much clearer what the job requires.

Two approaches may be helpful. One is to start ‘bottom up’ – to look at the evidence that can be provided for each dimension and level for the post. For example, for Core 2, (Personal and People Development) level 2, evidence for indicator f (“Offers information to others when it will help their development and/or help them meet work demands”) could be provided by emails sent to colleagues on a team providing advice on their own development; then the example of application might read, “Support new members of the team by providing verbal and written advice on standard operating procedures and explaining why they are important”.

The other approach is ‘top down’ – to use the generic examples but to then tailor them for the individual post, either in a separate interview or during appraisal. The advantage of this approach is that it retains a prompt for developing examples for future years, as a post holder develops.

If the outline is right for the role, it is likely that the same piece of work will provide evidence for achievement in more than one dimension. For example, where the evidence is a business plan, business plan different parts may well provide evidence for Core 4 (Service Improvement) as well as G4 (Financial management) and G5 (Services and Project Management). It reduces the workload when doing reviews if a single piece of evidence can be used for more than one indicator in a dimension as well, perhaps only requiring three or four items to cover a whole dimension and all its indicators.

Anne Brookes
National Blood Service

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