Learn: Learn

The King's Fund: Counting the cost of NHS strikes (23 February 2024)

Fri, 15 Mar 2024 16:42:34 +0000

Reading between the lines of the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan (February 2024)

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 14:20:00 +0000

The NHS workforce in England: Parliamentary research briefing (29 February 2024)

Mon, 11 Mar 2024 17:10:56 +0000

Nurse staffing and education and hospital mortality in nine European countries: a retrospective observational study (14 May 2014)

Sun, 03 Mar 2024 09:32:00 +0000

Staff shortages: what’s behind the headlines? (King's Fund, 6 February 2024)

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 10:53:00 +0000

All you need to know about physician associates’ legislation (Medscape, 21 February 2024)

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 11:19:36 +0000

The King's Fund: Following compassion (29 January 2024)

Fri, 09 Feb 2024 17:53:41 +0000

The NHS’s approach to sickness absence is ineffective and discriminatory (HSJ, 24 January 2024)

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 11:41:00 +0000

#StayAndThrive podcast (10 May 2023)

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 16:12:00 +0000

Factors affecting medical residents’ decisions to work after call (January 2024)

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 16:59:38 +0000

Key findings

Positive feedback from attending physicians about taking PCDs off in the past had the greatest impact on respondents’ decisions to take a PCD off, increasing the probability by 27.3%
This was followed by chief resident comments about the resident looking tired (16.6% increase)
There was a 13.9% increase when respondents had never heard their attendings comment about PCDs off as either positive or negative.
Factors that had the largest effect on decreasing the probability of taking a PCD were negative feedback about taking PCDs off (14.3% decrease), continuity of care concerns (10.8% decrease), and whether the resident was looking forward to an assignment (7.9% decrease).

Is state trauma funding associated with mortality among injured hospitalized patients? (16 December 2023)

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 11:02:51 +0000

Burnt out or something more? Examining the real root cause of NHS workforce challenges (26 April 2023)

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 16:21:08 +0000

Support workers and patient safety (Professor Richard Griffin, 21 November 2023)

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 11:08:00 +0000

NHS staff wellbeing: Why investing in organisational and management practices makes business sense (June 2022)

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 16:06:00 +0000

Addressing the significant financial challenges created by industrial action in 2023/24, and immediate actions to take

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 09:15:00 +0000

Partha Kar: Sorting out the mess around medical associate professionals (17 November 2023)

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 17:08:51 +0000

The state of medical education and practice in the UK: Workforce report 2023 (GMC, 10 November 2023)

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 16:16:00 +0000

Conclusions and key insights for workforce planning

The number of licensed doctors continues to grow rapidly, with those joining outnumbering those leaving by more than two to one since 2019. However, there are still high vacancy rates and workforce pressure.
Over half (52%) of new joiners in 2022 were international medical graduates (IMGs).
Even if the ongoing and planned increases to UK medical school places are complemented by a replication of NHS England’s NHS Long Term Workforce Plan (LTWP) in all UK countries—and if those future UK graduates were to replace future IMG joiners—the UK’s healthcare systems would still need large numbers of doctors to continue joining from abroad. Welcoming, integrating, and retaining all doctors who join from abroad will be crucial to meeting the UK’s future healthcare needs.
The proportion of doctors leaving the workforce has only returned to the pre-pandemic level of just under 4%. But there are worrying signs. A growing proportion of doctors plan to leave the profession as a result of high levels of dissatisfaction and high risk of burnout. We may be in a limited window of opportunity to address current issues before they manifest into larger proportions of doctors leaving the profession.
The growth in the specialty and associate specialist (SAS) and locally employed (LE) doctors group appears to be mainly driven by those taking up LE roles as opposed to SAS roles. In 2021, there were more than double the number of LE doctors (22,576), compared with SAS doctors (10,349), working in England and Wales.
The LE doctors cohort has grown because of both IMG joiners and the increasing proportion of doctors who are taking longer periods of time away from formal postgraduate training after their second foundation year (F2).
As well as taking time away from training after F2, there are training stages within programmes that many doctors take longer to complete than the minimum possible time. Our data show that undertaking research and gaining experience in a different post partly explain why some training levels take longer than others.
The UK’s healthcare systems must evolve to take advantage of the upsides in the broader range of experiences that doctors are building. Adding flexibility to the evidential requirements for joining the Specialist Register or GP Register will be important and legislative changes mean that is now in progress.

Reimagining the nursing workload: Finding time to close the workforce gap (McKinsey & Company, 26 May 2023)

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 12:32:48 +0000

Waste not, want not: Strategies to improve the supply of clinical staff to the NHS (Nuffield Trust, September 2023)

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 12:04:02 +0000

Key facts

More than 83,000 students accepted a place to study an undergraduate or postgraduate clinical degree (including medicine, nursing, midwifery and the allied health professions) across the UK in 2022.
£2.6 billion was spent on undergraduate education and training in 2022/23 in England, with a further £2.5 billion spent on postgraduate medicine and dentistry.
Only half of nurses, midwives and nursing associates (52%) and two in five doctors (39%) joining the UK professional registers were trained domestically in the latest year of data.
Around one in eight nursing (13%) and radiography (13%) students did not gain their intended degree between 2014 and 2020, compared with 5% for physiotherapy. Attrition was on the rise for nursing, physiotherapy and radiography in the two years before the Covid-19 pandemic – for radiotherapy it was up to one in six (17%) in 2018/19 compared with 13% in 2016/17.
Only one in 14 nursing graduates (7%) do not begin their career as a nurse after graduating. However, around one in nine midwifery graduates (11%) and one in seven occupational therapy graduates (15%) do not immediately join their respective profession.
6,325 fewer new nurses with a UK nationality joined NHS hospital and community services in the year to March 2022 compared with the two years before that (a fall of 32%).
Around one in five radiographers (17%), nurses (18%), occupational therapists (21%) and physiotherapists (21%) have left NHS hospital and community settings within two years… this is broadly twice the level seen for midwives (10%), although some professions have more alternative
employment opportunities than others, both inside the public sector (for example, general practice) and outside (for example, private practice and social care).
The annual leaving rate from NHS hospital and community services flattens out after five years (leaver rates in the subsequent three years vary
from 1 percentage point for nurses to 5 percentage points for occupational therapists).
Most medical students successfully graduate and start their first foundation year (which they must complete to become fully registered) but only 30% of those completing foundation training in 2021/22 continued straight into GP or consultant training posts.
Fewer than three in five doctors (56%) in ‘core training’ remained (even in a different role) in NHS hospital and community services in England eight years later, with half (24%) of this attrition seen in the first two years.

How bad does the NHS crisis need to get? (June 2023)

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 07:42:00 +0000

Workplace-based knowledge exchange programmes between academics, policy-makers and providers of healthcare: a qualitative study (10 July 2023)

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 07:24:00 +0000

What labour force survey data can tell us about the workforce in the health and social care sector (1 September 2023)

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 13:34:00 +0000

Nurse-to-patient staffing ratio laws and regulations by state (21 March 2023)

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 14:55:00 +0000

Career intentions of medical students in the UK: a national, cross-sectional study (12 September 2023)

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 11:41:00 +0000

The benefits of nurse-to-patient staffing ratio laws and regulations (23 March 2023)

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 09:00:00 +0000