One of the leading figures in the UK recruitment sector has called for a strategic review of the UK health and social workforce to tackle the debilitating NHS backlog.
Neil Carberry, CEO of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation – the voice of the UK’s £40bn recruitment industry.
Speaking to Newcross Healthcare’s Voices of Care podcast, the CBI’s former executive director of human resources and infrastructure says it’s time the healthcare sector stopped treating permanent, part-time and agency workers as separate entities.
“I think the idea that we have a healthcare workforce that can be easily sliced and diced needs to be scrapped. We need to start thinking about a workforce that is a workforce and, in the longer term, think about why people want to work in healthcare.
“There are currently more people in the UK who are on long-term sickness and therefore economically inactive than other countries. That must be due to NHS backlogs. Part of the challenge for all of us is figuring out how to solve this. How do we deal with NHS backlogs of tax controls and make sure what we are doing is meeting patients’ needs in a really good way?”
The recruitment sector, he argues, is one of the UK’s major undersold success stories and plays a crucial role in enabling the ailing NHS to bounce back
“It’s about helping employers, be they corporate or hospital foundations, to do things more efficiently and effectively and to meet needs that they cannot meet on their own, particularly when it comes to temporary work.
“The bottom line for the industry is that we should be advisors, we should be partners with customers to ensure we are helping them through difficult times. We call our 500 healthcare and social workers ‘NHS Human Resources Partners’ because that’s what they aspire to be.”
Elsewhere in the podcast, Mr. Carberry shares his thoughts on how the pandemic has helped forge important partnerships between government agencies and hospital trusts, digital employment reviews, and the challenges of creating a sustainable labor market that accommodates changes in the healthcare and… Health sector adequately reflects social assistance since 2016.
Separately, a recent study conducted by YouGov for Newcross Healthcare, a leading provider of caregivers and nurses, found that more than a quarter of caregivers (27%) said they plan to leave the sector in the next 12 months, while just 1 in 5 members of the public said they would consider a career in the care sector, compared to two-thirds (67%) who do not due to factors such as low pay, the ‘daunting’ nature of the work, stress and long hours would .
Hosted by healthcare expert Suhail Mirza, the podcast episode starring Neil Carberry is now available on the Newcross Healthcare website alongside previous episodes of the series https://www.newcrosshealthcare.com/voicesofcare as well as onyoutube, Spotify, Apple and a number of other podcast platforms.
You can watch the full podcast here: https://youtu.be/XRj_UFAqImI
