Effective ways to combat the NHS staffing issue – Opinion of an HRM researcher

By Rayhan Abdullah Zakaria  Chartered MCIPD

 

I love the NHS and it saddens me when I hear negative coverage about the NHS. In this short blog, I will share some of my thoughts about the best ways to tackle the current NHS staffing crisis. The points here can be used locally or nationally as they are all generic. So let’s get started

 

Make it an awesome place to work

People leave if the culture of the team, department, or organisation is not what it should be. We need to make our team, department, and hospital NHS trust the best place to work, where staff or would-be staff wants to come and work. One of the ways you do this is to start by listening to all levels of staff and service users and addressing all the known issues. This could be done via a 360-degree detail consultation with staff, service users, and key stakeholders, covering culture, process, finance, risks, and any other key themes.

 

Pay them 

NHS staff at all levels are one of the hardest, most caring, and most dedicated workforces out there in the world, so if you want to motivate and get them to perform well start by paying them a proper wage. This should not only be their pay but also fix their pension so that the staff will be safe in their knowledge that they will be well looked after once they reach retirement age.

 

Inspire the next generation

We need to make sure in every school, college, and university up and down the country when children/students are asked what do you want to be when they grow up/graduate they should include working for NHS among their top 3 careers. NHS is the real superhero in our time and this needs to be drilled into our future generations. Working to save lives and relieve suffering is one of the greatest acts anyone can do.

 

Fund training 

Regardless of how long it takes to train many of the NHS professionals we need to have a detailed plan in place with proper funding for X number of NHS professionals which will fully allow the NHS to meet the demand it is put under. Fund all NHS professional courses so that the would be students are attracted to enter a lifelong career within the NHS. Increase immediately all university/college NHS career-related course allocations, make new roles such as an associate nurse, etc, and work with agencies to recruit international highly skilled medical staff. All these should be in place while we focus on increasing all NHS-related career numbers within the UK.

 

Equip your staff 

Give your staff the necessary tools to do their duty efficiently. This could be to invest heavily in staff development, staff capabilities, development of multi-disciplinary teams, implementation of proven cost-effective digital tools, and detailed succession planning for each role within the NHS.

 

Cut out waste and bureaucracy

Every large organisation has wastage we need to manage this and cut out all bureaucracies. We need to do a full review of the highest costs from energy, and sourcing of medicine, and look at ways to minimise these. For example, NHS could look at ways to develop its own top twenty most used medicine within the NHS, at present it may be cheaper to get medicine from abroad but in the long run, when there is a supply chain issue it creates a major knock on effect and ultimately affects our service users. Our goal should be to be more self-sufficient relying on our in-house homegrown resources.

 

 

Provide strong humanistic leadership

Best performing leaders are the ones who listen to their workforce and can influence all key stakeholders to move in the right direction. The key here is that we are a team effort and our main goal is to do good for all our service users. We need to forget the power play, and politics and come together and work as one. If we can all work together to contain the pandemic and develop vaccines in record time why not be able to tackle other issues which are facing our NHS?

 

In conclusion

The NHS is the greatest asset of the United Kingdom. If we do not forget our differences and not work together than we won’t have anything left of the NHS. Containing the pandemic has shown we can do it so I for one still believe in the NHS and only hope that it is here for our future generations.