Recommendation 6

The NHS’s recovery cannot succeed without comprehensive, realistic and sustainable plans for the future of the workforce and the capacity of adult social care. The Royal Colleges of Radiologists, Surgeons, Nursing, Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, and Ophthalmologists all submitted evidence to us stressing the need for strategic workforce planning. In our March 2022 report on NHS backlogs, we stated that “the NHS will be less able to deal with backlogs if it does not address longstanding workforce issues”. Deferring action on this means not making the best use of the NHS’s existing hardworking and committed frontline staff. It is also clear that the success of the recovery programme is reliant on realistic long-term planning in other areas of health and care, including the capacity of adult social care where this is reducing flow through hospitals. The Department confirmed some of the steps it will take immediately, including to publish an independently verified forecast of the number of health professionals the NHS requires during 2023 and to allocate additional funds to improve hospital discharge into adult social care. These are not end-points, however, and results of this work must be incorporated into realistic planning assumptions for NHS elective and cancer recovery. Recommendations: • The Department of Health and Social Care should work with NHS England to reassess the achievability of elective and cancer recovery targets following the publication of its workforce plan in 2023, and planned improvements to the discharge of patients into adult social care. It should write to us as soon as possible describing the conclusions of this achievability assessment. • The Department should publish the underlying assumptions of its workforce projections alongside the forecasts in the workforce plan. This should include quantification of key assumptions, particularly on productivity, domestic training and overseas recruitment and, in full, the independent reviewer’s ass