Recommendation 6

Government needs to do more to support the health and social care workforce, who have been under constant pressure during the pandemic, to ensure its resilience going forward. The pandemic has compounded pre-existing challenges in the health and social care sectors. In February 2020, the NHS had about 40,000 nursing vacancies and 9,000 vacancies for medical staff, while patient waiting times were continuing to slip and the number of patients on waiting lists for non-urgent treatment was rising. Longstanding staffing issues and backlogs, arising from failures in workforce planning and recruitment, have exacerbated the impact of the pandemic not only on the public, but also on the health workforce. NHS and frontline workers, already under pressure before the pandemic, have had to deal with the mental and physical strain of the response and are now tackling backlogs whilst carrying high numbers of vacancies. The NHS estimated in December 2020 that it had nearly 89,000 full-time equivalent vacancies across secondary care settings in 8 Initial lessons from the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic England. We are concerned about the impact of the pandemic on the mental health of key workers and burnout levels, which may result in more individuals leaving the medical profession and even higher vacancies rates going forward. This makes the publication of the long overdue NHS People Plan even more urgent. Recommendation: The Department should write to us by 31 October 2021 setting out what it is doing to provide mental health and emotional support to NHS staff, what metrics it is using to track the effectiveness of the measures adopted, and how it is performing against those metrics. It should also write to us by 31 December 2021 to provide an update on the substantive long-term NHS workforce plan to ensure the resilience of the health and social care workforce. Initial lessons from the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic 9 1 Lessons from the government’