How to become strategic planner

You’ll support NHS boards and health and social care organisations through a wide range of activities, for example:

• Understanding the needs of their population. You’ll draw on a wide range of data, evidence, and insight from people with lived and living experience. It will help you to understand what health and social care needs people have and how they want these needs met.
• Looking to the future to understand what people might need in the future. 
• Analysing the legislative, policy and wider landscape and interpreting what this means for the organisation’s strategic plans.
• Helping to piece together the various sources of information and insight into a coherent strategic direction.
• Identifying and analysing the gaps between what is currently done and what good practice looks like to explore areas that need investment and change.
• Understanding the dynamics of how the various parts of the health and social care system interact to identify the areas for investment and change.
• Identifying and analysing the options the organisation has for closing these gaps and meeting people’s health and social care needs.
• Supporting the commissioning, set up of services and decommissioning of services. 
• Taking monitoring and performance information and understanding its implications for strategic planning and reporting progress against the plans.

Strategic planners bring a combination of a ‘way of thinking’ and a set of analysis and interpretation skills. To become a great strategic planner, you’ll either have or be focusing on developing the following skills:

• critical thinking - thinking strategically about the big picture and being able to link a wide range of activities and services to how they fit within that bigger picture.
• curiosity - being curious about what is happening and why to be able to apply creative ideas to complex challenges.
• sense-making - understanding a wide set of data, information and what people are telling you and being able to interpret and express this back to varied audiences in a way that is tailored to the needs of each audience.
• communicating and collaborating - building strong relationships within and between different organisations to draw on the insight, evidence and expertise of others to inform strategic planning activity.
• leading and taking initiative - challenging and questioning the status quo to help support organisations to think differently about things.

Strategic planning teams tend to sit in the heart of the corporate centre of organisations and provide support widely across the organisation. This means you’ll work collaboratively with a wide range of disciplines and seek to bring together this varied expertise to build a single coherent picture for planning. In particular you are likely to:

• Work closely with clinicians, managers, and senior leadership staff within your NHS board or health and social care partnership to draw together information to produce comprehensive analysis, strategies, and plans.
• Support the board for NHS boards, integrated joint boards for health and social care partnerships and their executive teams with strategic planning functions.
• Collaborate with other NHS boards, health and social care partnerships and community planning organisations to create collaboration and consistent strategies and plans.
• Engage with Scottish Government policy teams and NHSScotland leadership staff to work on the development and implementation of policy, strategies and plans.

All NHS boards and health and social care partnerships (HSCPs) employ strategic planners. This means there are opportunities to work in strategic planning no matter where you live in Scotland. Some roles will have a focus on the geography that these NHS boards or HSCPs cover, while others within the national NHS boards will have a Scotland-wide focus. 

Strategic planning roles are usually office-based. Most NHS or HSCP employers in Scotland offer hybrid working options with time in the office and working remotely from home.