Abstract for: Horizon 2035: The role of SD in developing a vision for the health, social care and public health workforce in England

Horizon 2035 is a programme of work commissioned by the Department of Health in England. It takes a whole system view of how plausible challenges across the health and care system may unfold over the next 20 years in terms of the demand and supply of wellbeing skills within the workforce. The CfWI robust workforce planning approach has been used for Horizon 2035. It combines system dynamics and systems thinking methods, enabling qualitative and quantitative analysis of future pressures on the health and care system. Workforce in this programme has a broad definition that includes paid professionals such as doctors and nurses, as well as rarely considered informal workforces such as unpaid carers and volunteers. A key success of the work to date has been to bring together expertise from across the system, including over 400 stakeholders across health, public health and social care to design multiple futures using horizon scanning and scenarios. The work has then simulated these futures using systems dynamics modelling to support policy analysis and aid robust decision making. A key requirement of the project has been the explicit representation of uncertainty in the quantitative modelling as well as having practical outputs to support policy makers