Chronic staff shortages are raising the pressure on NHS staff, with long working hours and high anxiety driving more staff to quit. Sky News analysis shows that a surge in resignations due to work-life balance cost the NHS 10,000 staff last year.
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"You can’t do anything the way you’d want to do it," Linda says."It’s difficult to say for sure, but there are probably more errors. The idea that it’s less safe for patients causes a huge amount of stress." The strain on NHS staff is also evident in the growing number taking time off for mental health reasons. In September 2022, nearly half a million working days were lost to anxiety, stress, or depression-related absences. That's equivalent to one in every 80 working days, a 56% increase since 2015.
A recent report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that nurses and midwives who took at least three days off for mental health were 27% more likely to have left the NHS altogether three months later. For consultants, the figure was 58%. "It’s not that doctors in this country are particularly poorly paid compared to other workers," says Billy Palmer, an expert in NHS workforce issues at the Nuffield Trust, a think tank.
The same dynamic is likely to play into foreign healthcare workers’ decisions about relocating to the UK. In 2010, a nurse coming to the UK from Slovenia could expect a 37% boost to their living standards. As of 2020, they would earn 4% more by staying put. "There's lots of reasons people would want to come to the UK - they might be paid better here than elsewhere, or they're provided with the training opportunities they couldn't have at home. With the current situation, getting better working conditions or pay here might be a less realistic prospect."
The UK's reliance on foreign staff is increasing. In 2021, for the first time, doctors from outside the UK or Europe made up the majority of new additions to the medical register. A recent report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that, compared to those trained in the UK, EU-trained consultants were 23% more likely to leave the acute sector in any given month. For those from outside the EU, the difference was 56%.It’s not just other countries that the NHS is competing with for staff, but other sectors within the UK.
Even higher-paying roles, like GPs and specialists, are now facing increased competition from the private sector. In 2018, for instance, there were 22,400 applications for 12,400 specialist training posts. By 2022, an increase in the number of medical students meant that the number of applications ballooned to 36,600. The number of posts available, however, shrank to just 12,100. As a result, two in every three applications were rejected - up from less than half in 2018.
The health service has expanded its workforce by 179,000 in the last four years, but growing demand for staff means that vacancies are rising, not falling. The NHS remains far from meeting that target, and is only just now returning to pre-pandemic levels of elective activity.
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