See the latest information and briefing on workforce planning in the Health and Care Bill.
A coalition of almost 90 health and care organisations – including the Royal College of Physicians – calling for stronger provisions on workforce planning in the Health and Care Bill has issued a briefing ahead of committee stage in the House of Lords in January 2022.
You can download a briefing and see the full list of organisations in the coalition at the bottom of the page.
MPs rejected the amendment tabled by the Rt. Hon. Jeremy Hunt MP to strengthen workforce planning in November 2021 despite cross-party support and backing from the coalition of almost 90 sector organisations. The amendment has now been re-tabled by Baroness Cumberlege, supported by Lord Hunt of King’s Heath, Baroness Brinton and Lord Stevens of Birmingham.
The coalition of almost 90 health organisations represents service users and patients, doctors, nurses, social care workers, employers and providers in the NHS and the voluntary sector. This broad spectrum of the health and care sector is clear that the data gap on how many staff we need in future must be resolved to put the NHS and care workforce back on sustainable footing.
The amendment tabled by Baroness Cumberlege to mandate the regular publication of independent assessments of current and future health and care workforce numbers would achieve this, helping to close the data gap and strengthen accountability and transparency on workforce planning. The coalition believes any other amendment or clause tabled for this purpose needs to meet the following principles:
- Assessments must be national to ensure a collective understanding of current and future workforce numbers across health and care.
- Assessments must be independent and laid in a report to parliament.
- Assessments must include projections for staff across health, social care and public health.
- Assessments must include staff numbers as follows:
- Numbers of staff at the time of publication.
- Numbers in 5, 10 and 20 years’ time based on current trajectory.
- Numbers needed in 5, 10 and 20 years’ time based on the projected health and care needs of the population over the same time frames.
- Demand must be modelled on demographic changes among patient population, demographic changes among health and care staff (eg. rise in part-time working),rising role of technology, changes to cost of health care, new and emerging patient pathways and evidence-based treatments and expected rise in certain health conditions.
- Role for NHS and key health and care stakeholders to feed in intel which impact staffing supply and demand requirements.
- Published at regular intervals that are more frequent than every 5 years to enable the system to plan. The coalition recommends the assessments are done every 2 years.