Responding to the publication of the cross-party Commons health and social care select committee’s report, Professor Mike Griffin OBE, President of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh said:
We were pleased to be able to contribute to this report, and to see the Select Committee agree with many of the points that RCSEd has been raising for a number of years, especially on recruitment and retention issues. The report makes it abundantly clear that despite the long-standing recruitment and retention problems, understaffing in the NHS is worse than expected.
Moreover, long-term workforce planning doesn’t exist, there is no plan to reduce staff attrition and even short-term commitments around staffing “do not seem to be linked to service demand”. Training is also described as “unequal” and “inconsistent” across geographies and roles/professions and bullying was recognised as “stemming from bad work environments and being a structural or systemic issues.
As the report states, the ongoing workforce crisis is putting patients at serious risk of harm. Patients are also presenting themselves later and with more serious illness, meaning that early diagnoses are being missed and avoidable additional costs are being placed on already stretched NHS budgets.
We therefore call for urgent and concerted action to address the crisis. The Committee agreed with our assertion that training needs to be prioritised and for specific targets that focus on retention, recruitment and well-being to be implemented. Urgent attention also has to be given to the nonsensical pension arrangements that are directly affecting the hours that medical professionals are working.