The NHS Long Term Workforce Plan is a ‘lofty set of aspirations without any detail of how they’ll be delivered’, the RCN’s Director for England Patricia Marquis said today when giving evidence to the Health and Social Care Select Committee.
The one-off session invited health experts to give evidence about the new NHS Workforce Plan and looked at four core themes - funding, training, retention, and reform.
Patricia Marquis focused on the lack of detail in the Plan, the RCN’s concerns about attracting new nursing students and the NHS’ capacity to train them, and fears about preventing even more nurses from leaving the profession.
Speaking to the Health and Social Care Select Committee today, RCN Director for England, Patricia Marquis, said:
“What we’ve got is a plan that’s trying to solve a retention crisis with recruitment, and that’s not really the way to do it… I don’t think there’s granular detail, I think that’s what’s absent. A plan is absent. We have a nice lofty set of aspirations without any detail of how they’ll be delivered.”
The RCN says that while expanding nursing education is important, this does not address any of the systemic issues around the dire lack of experienced staff to supervise students once they’re on placement in the NHS.
Without increasing pay or investment in ongoing professional education, the College also says the Workforce Plan does nothing to address how nursing will be made an attractive profession to join in the first place and to prevent more qualified nurses from leaving.
Speaking about the Workforce Plan’s focus on expanding nursing education, she said:
“What in the plan is there to turn around the lack of applications to the programmes in the first place because we can’t recruit the number of places?... We can’t fill the places we’ve got now and there’s no evidence to demonstrate how we then intend to double that. So that would be where we say retention is critical.”
The RCN is also calling for the government to be legally accountable for healthcare workforce planning. This would ensure Ministers are held to account for delivery and Parliament given a mechanism to scrutinise policies. Since the UK Government has declined to accept legal accountability for workforce, there is no way to hold Ministers to effective delivery of this plan.
The College says the other important point is that this Plan is only for health and does not address social care, leaving a vital jigsaw piece missing in ensuring a sustainable nursing workforce.
Other panellists at the evidence session included writer and former doctor Dr Adam Kay, Charlie Massey, Chief Executive and Registrar at the General Medical Council, Professor Kamila Hawthorne, Chair of Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) Council and Alex Whitfield, Chief Executive at Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
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