Rhianedd Hurley, Founder and Director of Matrix, has almost 20 years of NHS experience across clinical, business, operational, data, and strategy and policy roles, including managing front line services during the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic and leading workforce transformation for the New Hospital Programme. This experience has enabled Rhianedd to develop significant medical workforce expertise, and understanding of the benefits of an integrated, holistic service level activity planning approach for patients, staff and organisations.

As a clinician, Rhianedd is strongly grounded in evidence-based practice. However, as an operational manager, Rhianedd quickly realised traditional medical workforce planning approaches left significant evidence gaps, and that service level activity planning was poorly adopted. These gaps created a mismatch between workforce establishment and front line reality, making both day to day management and future planning challenging.

To address the mismatch, close the gaps and promote the adoption of service level activity planning, Rhianedd undertook a thorough review of the principles and assumptions which underpinned traditional medical workforce planning processes. This learning led to her developing an innovative and potentially unique approach to planning, which has evolved into the Matrix Approach seen today. Designed to address potential flaws in traditional processes and their application, it improves accuracy and insight, and forms an effective part of broader service level activity planning. 

To support this new approach and ensure its consistent, high quality application, Rhianedd went on to develop a custom digital analysis and evaluation tool. Designed to enable effective, system agnostic alignment of a range of cross-functional data sources, it provides organisations with effective understanding of and meaningful insights into their medical workforce, and creates a basis for high quality, evidence-based planning.

Matrix Workforce Solutions grew from Rhianedd’s drive to share this experience and holistic, integrated approach to medical workforce management more widely to support patient and staff experience, and organisation and system resilience.