What is: The Business Planning Framework (BPF)

Planning Your Nursing Staff Requirements

The Business Planning Framework (BPF) is a tool to show the number of nursing and midwifery staff a service requires. The BPF is supported by Nurse-to-Patient ratio’s and the legislation.

The Business Planning Framework (BPF) is a mandatory tool for nursing and midwifery workload management.

The BPF is used to:

Calculate its nursing and midwifery human resource requirements
Develop and implements strategies to manage nursing and midwifery resource supply and demand
Evaluate the performance of its nursing and midwifery resources
Report workloads and escalates issues

Why is this important?

The BPF is a structured process for examining the environment to allocate resources to meet service needs. The BPF is a mandatory process if you manage nurses. Each person contributes differently towards the BPF so please speak with your manager.

Nurses are the single largest part of our workforce. If you manage nurses, then your role is to understand and apply the BPF to your service area. It is useful to understand the BPF even if you don’t manage nurses or midwives.

What do I need to do?

If you manage nurses or midwives you are required to have a Service Profile which includes a SWOT and an Escalation process.

Service Profile

The BPF comprises three stages:

Stage 1: Develop a Service Profile
Stage 2: Service Profile endorsement
Stage 3: Evaluation

The Service Profile outlines the find the number and mix of nursing & midwifery staff required to meet the needs of the service. All nursing staff should be involved in the development of the Service profile.

The Service Profile must include:

a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats (SWOT) analysis; and
Low Priority Activity List development.

The SWOT analysis helps to find the current and projected internal & external environmental factors that may impact on nursing/midwifery requirements.