NHS Providers submission to the Health and Social Care Committee inquiry on Workforce: recruitment, training and retention in health and social care
Key messages
- To recruit and retain sufficient staff, roles in the NHS and social care have to be appealing. Pay, flexibility, work/life balance, job satisfaction, and continuing professional development (CPD) can be improved with additional funding and focus. Wider pension reform is needed to avoid incentivising early retirement and instead retain experienced staff, and additional investment is needed to ensure that pay is not a factor in staff choosing to leave health and social care during this period of exceptionally high service demand.
- To ensure the NHS and social care workforce is sustainable, a fully costed and funded multi-year workforce plan is needed, covering both sectors. This plan must be based on local-level input and give the workforce numbers needed to not only address existing vacancies, but also to build flexibility into the system to enable the system to cope with fluctuations in demand. We hope that Parliament will ultimately support the proposed amendment to the Health and Social Care Bill to this end, along with NHS Providers and a broad coalition of health and care organisations who back the amendment.
- The adult social care reform white paper marks an important step towards a much-needed national vision for the social care workforce. However, there is insufficient funding attached to this ambition. Recruitment of social care staff would be helped by working towards the creation of a pay framework in social care that is either fully integrated with Agenda for Change (AfC) in the NHS or offers comparable rates. Progression in social care, and higher quality training offers, should also be addressed. This will require significant additional investment.
- There was no specific funding rise for the department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) workforce budget in 2021, and therefore no detail on what the upcoming Health Education England (HEE) budget will be. Protecting workforce training and development funding among the ringfenced NHS England and NHS Improvement (NHSE/I) budget will be vitally important when HEE merges with NHSE/I in 2023, though we recognise the benefits of integrating the function.
- There should be a focus on the long-term sustainability of recruitment practices, with both domestic and international recruitment recognised as important routes for health and social care, especially given the growing demands on the sectors.
- We welcome the addition of care workers and home carers to the Health & Care visa, and the Shortage Occupation List. We would encourage this to be enacted as soon as possible and would support this as a permanent change following the initial 12-month trial.
- Widening societal inequalities will continue to create uneven demand for services across the country, exacerbated by areas of high deprivation already struggling to recruit staff. Investment which makes those areas attractive places to work is key to narrowing inequalities by improving employment opportunities, which trusts can play a key role in as anchor institutions.