Co-designing a workforce career progression and development framework with Marie Curie UK

Marie Curie is the largest charitable provider of palliative and end-of-life care in the UK. This paper describes a 2-year project to co-design a career development and progression framework for their specialist palliative and end-of-life care workforce.

To illustrate how a collaborative systematic approach to complex co-design supports large scale workforce transformation.

A mixed-methods participatory action research design was used incorporating principles of co-design, appreciative inquiry and practice development.

Nine core workforce capabilities were identified as being critical to the delivery of person centered safe and effective palliative and end-of-life care for Marie Curie UK. These capabilities were embedded into appraisal processes at pilot sites, supporting role clarity and professional development. The authors present illustrations of the outputs of each phase of the career framework development as an audit trail from which to capture lessons learned, as well as the enablers and barriers to complex co-design.

The Marie Curie UK's Career Progression and Development framework provides clearly articulated expectations of all nursing roles within the workforce for each level of practice, including the learning and development activities that support ongoing professional development. Future plans are to extend this across the allied healthcare workforce so that it is fully integrative of all roles involved in supporting palliative and end-of-life care. This will help to support long-term workforce development planning for the future. It aligns with national plans to improve workforce recruitment, retention and development in the palliative and end-of-life care workforce and paves the way for illustrating how to do this effectively with front line staff involved in care, delivery.