Various reports have examined how the NHS could re-evaluate traditional staffing roles to ensure sustainable delivery of health services, as well as identifying keys issues that need to be addressed.
Various reports have recently examined how the NHS could re-evaluate traditional staffing roles to ensure sustainable delivery of health services, as well as identifying key workforce issues that need to be addressed in the future.
Faced with increasing demand, recruitment pressures and the need to do ‘more for less’, the NHS is having to re-evaluate the workforce and skills mix in order to ensure sustainability. Traditional roles and training are being examined and a number of reports are looking at how the up-skilling of the existing workforce could be achieved to support potential new models of care delivery.
‘Reshaping the workforce to deliver the care patients need’, published by the Nuffield Trust, claims that equipping NHS nursing, community and support staff with additional skills to deliver care is the best way to develop the capacity of the health service workforce, and will be vital to enable the NHS to cope with changed patient demand in the future. The report acknowledges, however, that expanding the skills of the non-medical workforce also presents big organisational challenges for NHS Trusts, and will not be easy to achieve in the current financial context. Despite this, changing staffing should be considered an urgent priority for Trusts.
Log in or register FREE to read the rest
This story is Premium Content and is only available to registered users. Please log in at the top of the page to view the full text.
If you don't already have an account, please register with us completely free of charge.
