Government progress on health and care workforce blasted as ‘inadequate’

The Health and Social Care parliamentary select committee’s Expert Panel has rated the government’s overall progress ‘inadequate’ on key NHS and adult care workforce commitments.

The evaluation by the panel of independent experts considered how the government had progressed overall against seven commitments it has made in three policy areas across the NHS and social care: planning for the workforce; building a skilled workforce and wellbeing at work, including reducing high rates of bullying in the NHS.

Experts found no evidence that targets for staff numbers were linked with patient and service need and little evidence of social care workforce planning at a local or national level. According to many stakeholders the Panel heard from, the lack of workforce planning by the government is having a negative impact on recruitment and retention in both sectors.

The government was unable to give a breakdown of spending for social care to demonstrate how the extra £1 billion committed annually was spent on additional social care staff, better infrastructure, technology, and facilities.

Rates of bullying, harassment and abuse in the NHS remain “concerningly high” with more than 1 in 4 NHS staff experiencing at least one incident of bullying in the preceding 12 months. NHS estimates that bullying costs over £2 billion a year however investment in tackling it falls woefully short for the scale of the task.

Professor Dame Jane Dacre, chair of the Expert Panel, said: ‘We could not give the government any higher than an “inadequate” rating on its overall progress in meeting its own targets set for the NHS and social care workforce. We were unable to rate progress on any of the individual commitments we evaluated as good.’

‘Rates of bullying in the NHS are far too high, and we found measures to tackle the problem were either inadequate or require improvement.

‘Worryingly, our evaluation found that overall progress on all the government commitments we looked at which involved social care, was inadequate.

‘In terms of learning how better to support staff, the government has underestimated the complexity of the fragmented delivery model in the social care sector and failed to put a mechanism in place to listen to the their views.’

Responding to the report, Professor Vic Rayner OBE, chief executive of the National Care Forum, said: ‘Following on the heels of the revelation of 165,000 vacancies in the adult social care sector by Skills for Care last week, the Health and Social Care Select Committee reports are timely but make challenging reading.  

‘NCF continues to work constructively with the government on its reform agenda but as these reports make clear, the scale of the challenge clearly requires immediate urgent action. In particular, we need a more concerted and meaningful attempt to create a dedicated and fully funded social care workforce plan alongside better pay, terms and conditions – their absence from the government’s reform agenda is the elephant in the room. The reports outline the very real human pressures this is causing, both on the people working in social care and the people they support – action is needed now.’