Workforce planning and nursing
Published: 17 October 2011
It’s all about supply and demand, says Tina Bishop
An independent assessment published recently examined a number of possible scenarios on the supply of NHS nurses in England over the next 10 years. They used ‘what if’ situations to model their effects on the NHS nursing workforce.
Taking into account the impact of potential future changes, such as changes in retirement decisions, or the numbers of new nurses being trained it found that in the worse case scenario 28 per cent of the nursing workforce could be lost over the next 10 years.
Many of us can remember the decisions made by the previous Conservative government in the 1990s which reduced the number of nursing student places. This resulted in a severe shortage of nurses a decade later. We can also remember senior staff travelling overseas to recruit nurses to address the deficit - often at great expense and often to the detriment of developing world countries which could not afford to lose staff.
Workforce for the future
We simply cannot afford to return to the boom and bust cycles too often experienced in the NHS. How future NHS workforce planning will be decided is still not clear. The new clinical commissioning groups in England will put employers in the driving seat in planning in delivering the workforce for the future: a workforce able to meet the health care demands of the population - demands we know will be influenced by the increasing number of elderly people with multiple complex health needs.
Of course adequate resources will have to be provided to make this happen. There is a lot of uncertainty around: the Queen’s Nursing Institute (QNI) has highlighted the decline in the number of district nurses and how this affects patient care, and the RCN has identified 40,000 nursing post which are earmarked to be lost over the next 10 years. The recent reforms and cuts have received a lot of media attention in recent months. However, workforce planning must be high on the government’s agenda, otherwise the consequences to patients and services and the future of nursing could be unbearable.