In January 2019 the NHS Long Term Plan was published with some aspirational ideas about how healthcare needs to evolve over the next 10 years to deliver the needs of the population. Kate Woodhead RGN DMS believes a key unanswered element of the plan was, “Where are the people coming from to deliver this grand scheme for the future?”
The NHS Long Term Plan set out a major shift from acute care to delivering far more care in the community by multidisciplinary teams of people being able to utilise technology to enable better communication and delivery.
Not only do we have a great and increasing demand for healthcare services but we do not have a great recent record on recruitment and retention, or on workforce planning. We lose people early as they are stressed out so they retire; we lose people early during their training – do we know why?
The greater the number of vacancies in primary care and in the acute system, the more tired the remaining staff become, often leaving for an easier role somewhere else. This is totally unsustainable. It seems from data that the NHS employs 1.3 million people and currently has 2500 fewer full time GPs than it needs – and, according to The Kings Fund, there has been a significant 43% drop in district nurses employed.1 The Royal College of Nursing recently reported 40,000 unfilled nursing vacancies, not specifying where those were.2
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