Address workforce or risk long-term plan, NHS told

The King’s Fund, Nuffield Trust and Health Foundation said the plan ‘risks becoming an unachievable wish list’ as staff shortages could lead to longer waiting lists and care quality deteriorating. A joint briefing, The healthcare workforce in England: make or break?, predicted vacancies could rise from 100,000 today to almost 250,000 by 2030 – a vacancy rate of one in six. If the NHS continues to lose staff and fails to recruit from abroad, this could rise to 350,000.

Anita Charlesworth (pictured), director of economics at the Health Foundation, said the NHS was already overstretched and services compromised by staff shortages. ‘This problem will only get worse over the next decade, putting access and quality of care at risk,’ she said.

‘Unless government and system leaders take radical action and prioritise the NHS workforce, staff shortages will more than double by 2030. The NHS can’t sustain current services, let alone improve, with such a gap between the staff it needs and the people available to provide care.’

The three organisations set out five tests for the long-term plan:

• Address the immediate workforce shortages
• Deliver a sustainable workforce over the next 10 years
• Support new ways of working across the health and social care workforce
• Address inequalities in pay, career progression and recruitment
• Strengthen workforce and health service planning.

 A more coherent workforce plan was needed to meet these tests. Workforce planning in the NHS in England was poor and was subject to restrictive immigration policies and inadequate funding for training places. Education and training funding had declined from 5% of health spending in 2006/07 to 3% in 2018/29 – the equivalent of £2bn. Funding was under further threat as the overall Department of Health and Social Care budget, excluding NHS England and capital allocations, will fall by £1bn in real terms in 2019/20, the think-tanks added.

Richard Murray, director of policy at The King’s Fund, said: ‘The NHS cannot meet increasing demand from patients without the workforce to staff services. Unless the NHS long-term plan is linked to a credible strategy for recruiting and retaining staff, there is a real risk some of the extra funding pledged by the government will go unspent and waiting lists for treatment will continue to grow.’

Nuffield Trust policy director Candace Imison pointed to the NHS’s ‘woeful’ record on workforce planning. ‘Unless the NHS long-term plan puts in place urgent and credible measures to shore up the workforce both in the short term and in the longer term, it risks being a major failure,’ she said. ‘Solving the acute and systemic problems affecting the healthcare workforce will not be easy, but we owe it to patients, staff and taxpayers to start now.’