Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 11
11
The Department has yet to publish a long-term plan to improve the resilience of the...
Conclusion
The Department has yet to publish a long-term plan to improve the resilience of the health and social care workforce. Our NHS nursing workforce report, published in September 2020, noted that there had been further delay to the overdue NHS People Plan, which was originally due to be published in 2019 and still had not been published. We also found that there was a risk that the NHS was focusing on short-term pressures at the expense of the necessary long-term strategy. We recommended that NHSE&I and Health Education England prioritise publication of the substantive long-term workforce plan as soon as possible utilising the NHS’s existing long-term funding allocations.23 In its response, the government noted that the NHS People Plan was an ongoing programme of work and that in July 2020, NHSE&I and Health Education England published the next stage of this programme, We are the NHS: People Plan 2020/21 – action for us all. This set out the national and local steps that needed to be taken for the rest of 2020–21 to support staff in the NHS and help manage the pressures of COVID-19 through the winter of 2020– 21.24 We asked the Department if it was formulating a plan in terms of numbers of people 19 COVIDA Study (Ev ILG012) 20 Committee of Public Accounts, Readying the NHS and social care for the COVID-19 peak, Fourteenth Report of Session 2019–21, HC 405, 29 July 2020 21 HM Treasury, Treasury Minutes: Government responses to the Committee of Public Accounts on the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth reports and the Nineteenth report from Session 2019–21, CP 316, November 2020 22 Qq 80–83 23 Committee of Public Accounts, NHS nursing workforce, HC 408, Session 2019–21, 23 September 2020, para 1 24 HM Treasury, Treasury Minutes: Government responses to the Committee of Public Accounts on the Eighteenth and the Twentieth to the Twenty-Fourth reports from Session 2019–21, CP 363, January 2021 Initial lessons from the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic 13 needed to cre
Government Response
Not Addressed
HM Government
Not Addressed
6: PAC conclusion: 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. 6: PAC 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. 6.1 The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Target implementation date: December 2021 6.2 The government recognises that pressures on the workforce throughout the pandemic have been extremely high and is committed to providing the workforce with the support it needs now and in the longer term to ensure its resilience. 6.3 At an early stage of the pandemic, the government prioritised the need for enhanced mental health and wellbeing support. NHS England and NHS Improvement (NHSEI) has invested £43 million in mental health hubs in 2021-22, building on the £15 million which was invested to establish these last year. The hubs provide outreach and assessments services to ensure staff receive rapid access to evidenced based mental health services. The 40-system wide mental health hubs are being rolled out nationally, operating at ICS level, meaning any health and care staff within the ICS area can access the hub for support. 6.4 DHSC has recently commissioned Health Education England (HEE) to undertake ‘Framework 15’. This will set out the strategic drivers of future workforce demand and supply including, but not limited to, demographics, science, the nature of work and public expectations. 6.5 While previous iterations of Framework 15 have focused on healthcare, this version will also include registered professionals working in social care, such as nurses and occupational therapists. This reflects the interlinked nature of health and social care as well as the introduction of integrated care systems. 6.6 HEE will lead the work working closely with DHSC, NHSEI and Skills for Care. They will engage widely over autumn and winter 2021 bringing in views from staff, patients / service users, carers and their representatives with a final publication planned for Spring 2022. 6.7 DHSC will write to the Committee as directed in the recommendation.