CLEARworkforce
Understand the true cost of delivering care
CWIC — the cohort workforce impact calculator. Define the activities associated with a patient cohort, estimate the time required to complete them, identify the workforce needed, and calculate the associated workforce costs. The insights support workforce planning, service redesign and tariff development.
From activity to workforce to cost — in one model
Most services know what they spend in total, but few can say what it genuinely costs to deliver care for a specific group of patients. Without that, workforce plans, business cases and tariffs rest on assumption rather than evidence.
CLEARworkforce builds the picture from the bottom up. Working with your clinical teams, it maps every activity a defined patient cohort requires, attaches realistic times and the staff groups involved, and turns that into a transparent workforce and cost model you can interrogate, challenge and reuse.
Because the model is built from activities rather than averages, it can be re-run for a redesigned pathway — showing what a change to skill mix, setting or process actually does to capacity and cost before anything is implemented.
Four steps from cohort to cost
Define the activities
Agree the patient cohort and map every activity associated with delivering their care — from first contact and diagnostics through to review, follow-up and administration.
Estimate the time required
Attach realistic durations to each activity, informed by the clinicians who deliver it, so the model reflects how the service actually runs rather than how it is described on paper.
Identify the workforce needed
Map activities to the staff groups and skill levels required, revealing where senior clinical time is used for work that could safely sit with another role.
Calculate the workforce cost
Convert time and skill mix into a transparent cost per cohort, per pathway or per patient — evidence you can take into planning, governance and commissioning conversations.
Four applications across the system
Workforce planning
Move from headcount assumptions to activity-based establishment planning. Understand how much workforce a cohort genuinely requires, where gaps sit, and what happens to capacity as demand grows.
Tariff development
Build defensible, bottom-up cost evidence for new or changing services. Where a pathway has no established tariff, CWIC provides the activity and workforce basis to propose one.
Cost modelling
Test scenarios before you commit. Model what a change to setting, skill mix or process does to workforce cost, and compare options side by side with consistent assumptions.
Service transformation
Underpin redesign with numbers. CWIC shows where time is spent today and quantifies the workforce impact of a proposed new model — the same evidence base CLEAR uses across its transformation programmes.
Why teams use CLEARworkforce
Evidence, not assumption
Workforce decisions rest on activity data agreed with the clinicians who deliver the care, making them far easier to defend in governance.
Releases senior clinical time
Surfaces activity that could safely sit with another role, informing skill-mix change that increases capacity without increasing cost.
De-risks redesign
Model the workforce and cost consequences of a new model before implementation, so surprises are found in the spreadsheet, not in the service.
Transparent and reusable
Every assumption is visible and adjustable. Once built, a cohort model can be re-run as demand, pathways or staffing change.
Speaks to finance and clinicians
One shared model that clinical teams recognise as their pathway and finance teams recognise as a costed plan.
Backed by CLEAR delivery
Used alongside CLEAR’s clinically led transformation method, so the model connects directly to recommendations and implementation.
Find out what your cohort really costs
Tell us about the patient cohort or pathway you want to model and we’ll walk you through CWIC with your own service in mind.