Summary
Despite being the employees who often have the most direct contact with service users, NHS clinical support workers, such as healthcare assistants and maternity support workers, have long experienced a range of barriers to their effective deployment and development. These include a lack of standardised entry requirements, inconsistent task deployment and truncated career progression pathways. These have a detrimental impact on service delivery, including patient satisfaction.
The degree to which local employers are able to determine the recruitment, deployment and development of support workers is a key reason why these issues endure; however, this article suggests that a deeper reason is the existence of a segmented labour market in the NHS, with support workers existing in a secondary market. This duality resides in the socio-economic differences between registered and non-registered staff.
Recent NHS support workforce strategies present an opportunity to finally address the issues support staff face.
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