The staffing crisis in the NHS
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 25 August 2022
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The NHS often appears to be in a state of permanent crisis. Recently, there've been headlines about long waiting times for ambulances and the huge backlog for routine surgery. Before that, the Health Service faced a two-year pandemic which may rear its head again this winter.
But the NHS also has a big underlying problem. It has tens of thousands of vacancies for doctors, nurses and other medical workers – and that makes all the other pressures on the Health Service even harder to handle.
So why does the NHS have a staffing problem? And what can be done to fix it?
Joining David Aaronovitch in The Briefing Room are: Annabelle Collins, Senior Correspondent at Health Service Journal Alison Leary, Professor of Healthcare and Workforce Modelling at London South Bank University Suzie Bailey, Director of Leadership and Organisational Development at The Kings Fund Mark Pearson, Deputy Director of Employment, Labour and Social Affairs at the OECD, Nigel Edwards, Chief Executive of the Nuffield Trust
Producers: Bob Howard, Kirsteen Knight and Simon Watts. Editor: Tara McDermott. Studio Manager: Rod Farquhar. Production co-ordinator: Siobhan Reed.
PHOTO CREDIT: (Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:10.2 | Welcome to the briefing room with me, David Daronovich. |
| 0:13.1 | The briefing room is the mind space in the metaverse, where a big subject becomes clear in less than half an hour with the assistance of the top experts. |
| 0:21.9 | This week, there's a staffing crisis in the NHS. Why is it happening and what can we do about it? |
| 0:31.0 | A couple of months ago, the briefing room took a broad look at the challenges facing the NHS. |
| 0:36.9 | Today, we want to dig a little deeper into one specific |
| 0:39.7 | but critical area of difficulty, the recruitment, training and retention of staff at all levels |
| 0:46.4 | within the service. Just why does the NHS have a staffing problem and what can we do to fix it? |
| 0:53.8 | Step inside the briefing room and we'll find out. |
| 0:59.3 | Joining me first in the briefing room to lay down some basic facts is Annabelle Collins, |
| 1:04.2 | senior correspondent at the Health Service Journal. |
| 1:07.6 | Annabelle Collins, what is the scale of the current staffing problem in the NHS? |
| 1:12.6 | Staffing is the main issue keeping NHS leaders up at night, and it has been for a number of years, even before the COVID pandemic hit. |
| 1:21.1 | In the English NHS, it's estimated the overall vacancy rate is around 8%, meaning a shortage of over 100,000 staff. And this has remained |
| 1:30.0 | fairly stable over the last five years. So it's not gone up significantly. It's been at that level |
| 1:35.0 | for some time. Yes, absolutely. But it's really important to add. There's no robust data on the |
| 1:41.2 | level of vacancies in the NHS. The figures above are based on aggregated |
| 1:44.9 | data, which includes job adverts. And in reality, it's probably much worse. Data from earlier this |
| 1:51.0 | year pointed to a sharp increase in staff choosing to resign from their jobs. So in the nine months to |
| 1:56.8 | January 2020, almost 70,000 NHS staff resigned, which was up from 57,000 two years before. |
| 2:04.6 | Now, which particular jobs in the NHS are most affected by shortages? |
| 2:09.2 | So the NHS doesn't have a surplus of any staff group, but some are in more trouble than others. |
... |
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