The Emergency Medicine Programme (EMP) held a conference on 10 February in Dublin Castle. In the five years that the EMP has been in existence, a model of care for emergency medicine in Ireland has been written and significant achievements have been made to improve the quality of care for the 1 million patients who attend Emergency Departments each year.

This conference aimed to recognise the hard work and dedication of emergency care staff who work tirelessly to implement the plans and initiatives of the EMP. Within the conference an Emergency Department Nursing Workforce Planning Framework was launched.

The Office of the Nursing and Midwifery Services Director (ONMSD) in Ireland, on behalf of the National Emergency Medicine Programme (EMP) commissioned the RCSI Institute of Leadership, Ms Sibéal Carolan and Dr Philippa Ryan Withero, to design a Workforce Planning Toolkit for the Emergency Medicines Programme. The development of this toolkit, as part of an overall ED workforce planning framework is to assist and support nurse managers of all levels in determining the most effective and appropriate utilisation of their existing nursing (and support staff) resource in emergency settings. This toolkit serves as a guide to support local nursing teams to assess and plan their nursing workforce to meet the needs of their individual services, in collaboration with local management.

Professor Ciarán O'Boyle, Director of the Institute of Leadership, said: "This toolkit aspires to provide a systematic and consistent approach to emergency nursing workforce planning, and to provide the tools to collect the evidence to strengthen and enhance the use of the nursing resource to its full potential."

A number of representative EDs from across the country were fundamental to the development of this toolkit, by sharing their knowledge, insight and expertise, along with sharing their activity data during arranged site visits and testing of the tools within this kit as the toolkit evolved. The site visits involved facilitated observation, focus groups and informal discussions with key staff on their sites. Their expertise and insights were invaluable to the development of not only the tools, but equally in sharing case studies and direct experiences in practice to inform a comprehensive toolkit from the practitioner/manager's perspective.

This toolkit is designed to complement the work of the Emergency Medicine Programme (EMP) and to be used in conjunction with the Darthmouth Institute Clinical Microsystems Academy (TDIMA), Clinical Microsystems Quality Improvement Methodology which is being adopted by the EMP for programme implementation.