The King's Fund - NHS staffing shortages: Why do politicians struggle to give the NHS the staff it needs? (24 November 2022)

Summary

The King’s Fund and Engage Britain commissioned Bill Morgan, a former Conservative special adviser, to explore what can get in the way of ministers taking meaningful, long-term action to address NHS workforce shortages. In this report, he focuses on the role of politicians in workforce planning and delivery. 

The report sets out the scale of the workforce crisis and the impact that it has. It also considers the political reasons around why it has been so hard to fix and considers three factors that could contribute to tackling the current shortages:

1. Transparency in workforce forecasts
2. The establishment of an independent workforce-planning organisation
3. Accepting the NHS’s historical reliance on recruitment from outside the UK as explicit future policy and planning accordingly