Source · Select Committees · Health and Social Care Committee
Recommendation 9
9
Deferred
Paragraph: 58
Require Government to publish funded maternity workforce plan matching RCOG staffing levels within six months.
Recommendation
There is an urgent need for a robust and funded maternity-wide workforce plan, which must be delivered without further delay. The Government must commit to funding, recruiting, and retaining the workforce at the level set out by the forthcoming report of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. Once this report has been published, the Government must set out a plan within six months for how it intends to recruit the number of people to deliver the level of staffing that the Royal College deems necessary to deliver safe and compassionate care to mothers and babies.
Government Response Summary
The government agreed with the need for robust workforce planning and committed to publishing an NHS England Long Term Workforce Plan shortly, which will include projections, but did not commit to specific funding and recruitment levels or the six-month plan based on the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists' forthcoming report.
Paragraph Reference:
58
Government Response
Deferred
HM Government
Deferred
Recommendations 1 and 2 have been grouped together for an overarching response to the Committee. We agree this recommendation. We agree with the need for robust, long term, workforce planning and have commissioned two large pieces of work to support this ambition: the Health Education England (HEE) led long term strategic framework (Framework 15) for workforce and the NHS England Long Term Workforce Plan. The Long Term Workforce Plan will include independently-verified projections for the number of doctors, nurses and other professionals that will be needed in 5, 10 and 15 years’ time, taking full account of improvements in retention and productivity. We have committed to publishing the Long Term Workforce Plan shortly. HEE’s work in developing Framework 15 has already supported the development of the Long Term Workforce Plan. Framework 15 is designed to help ensure the workforce we invest in today is fit for the future and makes the most of every pound spent. This will be achieved through setting out clarity of service ambitions and shared, explicit assumptions about the likely impact of key drivers of change on both demand and supply for the health and regulated social care workforce. The development of HEE’s Framework 15 commenced with a large-scale public ‘Call for Evidence’ to identify the factors that may have the greatest impact on demand for the health and regulated social care sector over the next fifteen years, and what they might mean for workforce supply. HEE and partners subsequently held over a thousand different conversations, including deliberative events creating the time and space for people to develop a vision for the future and identify the workforce required to deliver it. The details and reports from this comprehensive process of engagement are supplemented by a review of around two thousand documents and data sources, to ensure that any propositions are supported by an evidence-base and reflect wider views. All of the conversations, deliberations and evidence that HEE have collated during this process have enriched the thinking and ensured the robustness of the Framework 15 report, and in turn fed into development of the Long Term Workforce Plan.