The NHS staffing crisis is about the expanding knowledge gap – not just numbers

A lot has been written about the workforce crisis in health and social care. 43,000 registered nurse vacancies, a 48% drop in district nurses in eight years and not enough GPs to meet demand.

When we talk about workforce, the focus is always on numbers. There are campaigns for safe staffing ratios and government ministers like to tell us how many more nurses we have. But safety is not just about numbers. Recent workforce policy decisions have promoted a more-hands-for-less-money approach to staffing in healthcare. More lower-paid workers mean something in the equation has to give. In this case, it’s skill and expertise.

In this article in The Independent, Patient Safety Learning's Trustee Alison Leary  discusses how healthcare has failed to keep frontline expertise in clinical areas due to archaic attitudes to the value of the experienced workforce.

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Source: The Independent, 15 December 2019