NHS facing major shortage of staff in key areas

By The Press Association29th April 2015News EnglandNews England, NHS, Report, Workforce

The NHS is facing a major shortage of workers in key areas such as primary care and mental health, a think-tank has warned.

Community nursing is also suffering from a lack of senior district nurses, which have fallen by 30%, while there are now 16% fewer community matrons than five years ago, the King’s Fund said.

Its report suggests that the shortage – which is leading to a reliance on agency staff at a cost of millions of pounds – could jeopardise plans outlined in NHS England’s Five Year Forward View to improve care.

It said its analysis of recent trends and pressures in three key areas of the workforce critical to this – mental health, primary care and community nursing – found that each is under “serious pressure”.

Within mental health, the number of inpatient nurses has fallen sharply by 15% over the past five years, while in primary care fewer training posts are being filled and more GPs are planning to retire early, resulting in a growing shortfall in the number of GPs.

The King’s Fund’s analysis of recent figures provided by NHS Professionals – the leading provider of agency staff to the NHS – showed that requests for temporary hours more than doubled between April 2012 and January 2015, which “represents a substantial financial burden for the NHS at a time when budgets are stretched to breaking point and risks reducing quality of care”.

The report said that while the establishment of Health Education England (HEE) has led to improvements in planning the workforce of the future, it is unclear who is responsible for managing the workforce needed today.

It calls for better national leadership and greater collaboration across local and regional levels along with improved availability of data, as it said a current lack of national data – particularly for temporary staff and the independent sector – makes long-term planning very difficult.

There is currently inadequate national-level assessment of supply and demand for most areas of the workforce, it added, which needs to be addressed.

Rachael Addicott, senior research fellow at the King’s Fund and the report’s lead author, said: “The workforce is a key asset for the NHS and is pivotal in meeting the health needs of current and future patients. We need the right people in the right place, able to adapt their skills to changing demographics and work together to support new models of care.

“However the trends we are seeing are moving in the opposite direction, with an increasing over-reliance on temporary staff and a ‘black hole’ in the data needed to make effective workforce plans.

“Staff working for the NHS in 2015 will essentially be the workforce of 2020, so it’s crucial we have the right information to plan locally and nationally for retention and retraining as well as recruitment.

“National bodies will have to demonstrate leadership on this issue and local leaders should better coordinate efforts in their communities and regions to meet current need and build the future workforce.”