NHS can’t prepare for pandemic surge due to lack of staff, NHSE warns

The NHS has too few staff to prepare for a pandemic surge, while its ageing buildings and social care’s weak ‘resilience and capacity’ would also undermine its response, NHS England has warned.

A new NHSE submission to the Covid-19 public inquiry says funding pressure from 2010 has undermined the health service’s “resilience” and that “resilience and capacity issues in social care are national issues which must be addressed from the centre”.

The document was posted unnoticed on the inquiry website last month. No current or former NHSE leaders have so far given evidence to the inquiry. It is the first time NHSE has clearly set out that understaffing and underinvestment compromised the service’s readiness to deal with the pandemic.

Referring to the NHS’s ability to create “surge capacity [with] flexible staff and equipment which can be pivoted into different roles”, it goes on: “It is only possible to train staff to work more flexibly into different roles/environments if they can be freed up to attend training and refreshers. 

“This requires ‘surplus’ staff numbers on rotas, which is not currently possible in relation to many staffing groups across the NHS.”

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Source: HSJ, 3 October 2023