With an estimated 110,000 NHS vacancies and one in ten posts unfilled, there is huge pressure on existing staff, impacting patient care. Tackling staffing shortages is a key area for improvement. This could be changing for the better as NHS England has published its Long-Term Workforce Plan. It sets out how the NHS will address workforce challenges by recruiting and retaining healthcare workers.
The NHS People Plan encourages organisations to use collaborative bank models. This can assist in both recruiting and deploying staff across regions. A collaborative staff bank is an effective way for cross-system working to take place in an area. It enables integrated care systems to benefit from streamlined workforce management.
Better workforce planning
The 15-year workforce plan is a strategic approach to workforce planning. It aims to ensure that the NHS has the staff it needs to provide quality care to patients. By addressing staffing shortages and improving workforce planning, the plan will help to improve access to care and reduce waiting times for patients.
The plan includes a strategic workforce planning tool to help NHS providers deploy their workforce in the most productive way, including by improving skills and care.
Collaborative banks
Collaborative banks have the potential to be game-changing. There are 23 collaborative banks across NHS trusts, with ten more planned. This represents a 50% increase since the NHS People Plan was published in 2020 and covers nearly half of all trusts in England.
The collaborative bank programme enables groups of Trusts to increase their workforce agility and share their own substantively employed staff with each other across systems. Specifically, it targets external agency staff to fill part-time, occasional, or ad-hoc jobs and seeks to reduce these costs over time.
Not only does collaboration help to eliminate local competition for flexible staff (which inflates pay), it enables opportunities to move these staff around the system, promoting productivity and supporting work and career opportunities across the wider system.
As Tracy Ward, CEO of Agile Workforce, explains: “We know that staff appreciate the flexibility that working in an NHS bank can offer; however, while this should not be the only route staff have to secure the working pattern that best suits them and earn additional income, it should be the most attractive one – to help fill short-term shortfalls and reduce the NHS’s reliance on agency providers.”
Agile Workforce will support the NHS in taking measures that allow greater mobility of staff across boundaries and sectors through collaborative banks. The wider NHS will be supported to adopt these practices, building on the learning from primary care. For example, this can be achieved by:
- fostering effective relationships between partners and trusts
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investing in technology that makes it easier for staff to accept temporary shifts
Insourcing to help with waitlists
Waiting lists can be helped in the short term by insourcing. It is here that third-party organisations like Agile Workforce can help NHS trusts secure extra clinical capacity to meet increasing demand. The Insourcing of Clinical Services Framework Agreement supports the use of insourcing support services across the NHS. This short- to medium-term solution enables trusts to retain capacity planning in-house and ensures that patients are seen within the trust. Insourcing focuses on secondary care, and the services are used out of hours when not being used by the NHS to make efficient use of the services.
NHS expanding the use of private sector to tackle wait times
The Government has also announced that using the private sector to tackle the NHS backlog in England is to be expanded. The measures form part of a recently published system-wide recovery plan designed to tackle the issue of NHS waiting lists.
The private sector already carries out treatments and appointments for the NHS every year, and it has said it has the capacity to carry out about 30% more than it is currently doing. Labour has said 331,000 patients were missing out on treatment because of the underuse of the private sector.
New diagnostic centres
The government has announced that 13 new community diagnostic centres (CDCs) will open in England. These centres are being opened in a bid to reduce the intense pressure on NHS hospitals and cut NHS waiting lists, which are at an all-time high. CDCs will carry out an additional 742,000 scans, checks and tests per year. Eight of these will be private-sector operated. The NHS will run the remaining five. These will be established by the end of the year and are part of a commitment to set up a network of 160 clinics by 2025.
Hope for the future
The government hopes that by making use of capacity in the private sector and enabling patients to access this diagnostic capacity free, they can diagnose sooner and offer better access to treatment.
