Sunak announces 15-year NHS staffing masterplan

One of the issues the plan hopes to address, according to Rishi Sunak, is the country’s reliance on “attracting talented people from overseas rather than recruiting at home.”

Writing in The Sunday Times, he said: “The NHS Long Term Workforce Plan will be the biggest workforce training expansion in the NHS’s history. It will ensure we train, retain, reform and make the most of our talented and experienced staff.

“It will be a 15-year plan to give the NHS certainty, because we recognise it takes time to train these staff, who are among the most highly skilled in our society.

“We will be using the latest techniques and innovations to streamline the journey from classroom to clinic, to get more patients the care they need. And it will be backed by government funding and support, balanced against the wider pressures on the economy.”

Junior doctors in England last week announced a new five-day strike to happen next month as their dispute with the government over pay and staffing continues. If the planned strike between July 13 and 18 takes place it would be the longest single period of industrial action in the history of the health service.

Research published by The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) earlier this month argued that if the number of staff leaving the health and care sector due to long-term illness had been similar to those leaving education for the same reason during the period since Covid-19, there would be an extra 14,000 additional qualified staff still employed in the NHS in England today.

That follows a study by the University of Bath in February which showed 1 in 7 NHS workers had applied for non-NHS jobs in the previous six months - more than had wanted to leave at the time of the Winter 2020-21 wave of Covid.

Meanwhile, a new report published today has revealed that the NHS is performing “substantially less well” than similar countries on life expectancy and other healthcare outcomes.

The report, commissioned by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry and developed, researched and written by The King’s Fund, compared the NHS with the health systems of 18 similar higher income countries – the original 15 European Union member states, excluding Luxembourg, and the ‘Anglosphere’ (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand).

It found that the UK performs poorly compared to these countries on healthcare outcomes across different major disease groups and health conditions that are linked to avoidable deaths.

The research looked at the health services across the four nations, and found that the largest part of preventable mortality in the UK was cancer survival rates, while circulatory diseases such as heart attacks and strokes were the main cause of treatable mortality.

The UK had the fourth and second-highest rates of preventable and treatable mortality in 2019 among the healthcare systems in the study.

Another finding in the research was that UK has substantially fewer key physical resources than many of its peers, such as MRI scanners and hospital beds.

Of all 19 health systems in the study, the UK had the fewest number of MRI scanners in 2019, and only Sweden had a lower number of hospital beds per 1,000 people.