Stressed NHS staff in England quit at record 400 a week, fuelling fears over care quality

A record number of more than 400 workers in England have left the NHS every week to restore their work-life balance over the last year, according to a new analysis of the workforce crisis hitting the health service.

The flood of departures comes with staff complaining of burnout and cases of post-traumatic stress disorder following two years of battling the Covid pandemic. There are now concerns that the exodus is impacting the quality of care, with more than a quarter of adults saying they or an immediate family member had received poor care as a result of the workforce problems.

The findings emerged in an assessment of the health service compiled by John Hall, a former strategy director at the Department of Health and Social Care, for the Engage Britain charity. Concerns over the state of the workforce came top of its list as it investigated the public’s attitude towards health and social care services, which remain under pressure in the wake of the pandemic.

“The workforce crisis in the NHS has clearly penetrated the public consciousness,” Hall writes. “The UK has long had significantly lower numbers of doctors and nurses per capita than comparable systems … More recently, the impact of working conditions is showing an increasing impact on the ability of the NHS to retain staff. Around 50 in every 10,000 staff working in hospital and community health services in June 2021 left the service within the next three months, citing work-life balance as the reason. This was a new record.”

Julian McCrae, Engage Britain’s director, said frontline health and care workers were now “running on empty” and a plan for boosting the workforce was overdue. “NHS workers across the country have spoken to us about feeling overstretched, undervalued and struggling to get support in a chaotic system,” he said. “We can’t allow staff to burn out, while putting patients at risk of mistakes or spiralling downwards as they wait months for treatment. The government must act quickly to expand its promise of reform, based on listening to the people who use or work in the system every day. Only answers rooted in real experiences can deliver health and care that works for us all.”

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Source: BBC News, 26 February 2022