The challenge

Recruiting the nation’s best healthcare workers is just the beginning for Health Education England. The institution trains employees for seven years, investing as much as £250,000 into the careers of doctors.

Reducing turnover is critical. HEE needed help spotting the career moments where they could provide much-needed support.

The solution

Predicting dissatisfaction by helping HEE understand the dynamics around employee attrition over time, going way beyond high-level workforce analytics.

Building a unified data warehouse to process over 10 million records from multiple NHS and HEE systems, creating a scalable platform that data scientists across departments can use collaboratively.

Reinforcing confidence in data by collating and cleaning data from different sources to develop a machine learning model that predicts attrition throughout the career journey.

Transform focused on:

Quantitative research for a more in-depth understanding of attrition factors and potential intervention approaches.

Data management to create a centralised repository of employee information, making it easier to reuse models to improve performance and reduce time and cost to create insights.

Predictive modelling identifying churn signals for each trainee from the start of each placement and beyond.

The Sustainable Development Goals we hit with this project

Quality Education

We built this model to ensure course satisfaction and overall happiness in health education.

Gender Equality

The model was built to predict attrition without gender bias, and so the support for trainees predicted to attrite was the same, regardless of gender.

Decent Work and Economic Growth

It costs between £250 000 - £500 000 to train junior doctors and consultants. Every time a prediction leads to intervention and prevention of a trainee leaving, a significant cost is saved.

Reduced Inequalities

The attrition model was specifically built to provide support and progression for everyone in the training course, simultaneously providing opportunity and educational support.