The provision of safe and effective care requires that staff in the Health and Social Care Trusts are highly skilled and knowledgeable. 

It is important that managers are able to identify the skills and knowledge of their staff and, working in partnership with them, put development plans in place to facilitate continuing professional development.

One way of doing this is through adopting a structured Learning Needs Analysis process to gather and interpret information on the learning and development needs of individuals.  This helps managers clearly identify and plan the development needs of their teams to meet their needs of on-going and new service developments.