Determining the effectiveness of the Delphi method for quantifying the drivers of demand for health and social care

Abstract

This paper focuses on research of the Delphi method used in the Centre for Workforce Intelligence (CfWI). In the CfWI, the Delphi method is applied to quantify the uncertainties for the future workforce demand and supply modelling in health and social care. The objective of this research is to review and assess the strengths and weaknesses of the Delphi method as applied to recent CfWI projects, and to make recommendations for improving this method. The Strategic Options Development and Analysis (SODA) method is used in this research which contains three main steps. The first step is to conduct independent interviews with several staffs relevant to the Delphi procedure in the CfWI, from which lots of information about the specific application of the Delphi method in the CfWI can be obtained. The second step is to summarize the concepts got in interviews. A cognitive map can be achieved combing the summary of interviews, literatures, and the reports of the CfWI projects. The final step is to improve the cognitive map by interviewing some key staffs again. From the cognitive map, some problems existing in the current CfWI projects are founded, such as high attrition rate, time consuming, technical limitations, and so on. The relationships among different problems can be identified by analysing the relations of each concept in the cognitive map. In order to solve the problems effectively, the CfWI proposes an improvement plan using workshop Delphi instead of the web-based Delphi. In addition, the author puts forward a video workshop Delphi approach based on the workshop Delphi method.

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