Health and social care: winter resilience overview 2022 to 2023

Priority Two.

Focus on the expansion of our workforce over the course of Winter, through recruitment, retention and wellbeing of our health and social care workforce.

Our highly skilled and committed workforce is the cornerstone of our response every winter. In order to meet demand, we must continue to expand our capacity, ensuring that we support the wellbeing of our staff through challenging periods of high demand. We are pursuing a range of different strategies to grow the workforce, including investing in additional recruitment in order to protect and maintain high quality services; supporting the expansion of trainee doctor posts, to reflect the changing demands on our Health & Social Care System; supporting volunteers to play their part; continuing to grow controlled healthcare subjects intake in line with evolving demand projections, and supporting the career development of Health Care Support workers (HCSW) working at Agenda for Change Bands 2-4 across health and social care that ensures parity and consistency of education resources. We are also maximising the support available to registered health care professionals, enabling them to engage more fully in practice commensurate with their registrant status and the expectations of associated roles.

How we will deliver this priority:

• We are devolving powers to NHS Boards to utilise local flexibilities within NHS Pension arrangements, and offer ‘pension recycling’. This means NHS Boards will have the ability to assist staff affected by annual and lifetime allowance pension taxation issues. This action is intended to support the retention of staff and support service delivery as we approach winter.
• NHS Scotland has welcomed over 200 new nurses from overseas, thanks to £4.5 million of Scottish Government being made available in 2021/22. We are making £8 million funding available to support Boards in recruiting up to 750 additional nurses, midwives and allied health professionals from overseas, to boost our NHS workforce this Winter.
• We are progressing work in relation to developing opportunities for a career framework for Band 2-4 staff, with a particular focus on the development of new Band 4 assistant practitioners, as part of the Scottish Government’s Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professionals Task and Finish Group. An initial 250 Band 4 posts have been identified and we will now work with Boards to support the recruitment and training of staff into these posts, which are across acute, primary care and mental health settings.
• We are enabling retiring employees to continue in employment that is suitable to them and the service through the recently introduced NHS Scotland Interim National Arrangement on Retire and Return, which has been developed by the ‘Once for Scotland’ Workforce Policies Programme. The programme offers a process that supports retiring employees to return to employment in their Health Board on a part-time basis if they wish to do so.
• The Chief Nursing Officer working with NHS Boards will ask that Boards write to every retiree within their Board area asking them to support us with their skills and expertise this winter as set out in the recently published, Once for Scotland, Retire to Return policy.
• We have written to all health and care students encouraging them to explore opportunities for paid part-time work of relevance to their studies and have requested that Boards take steps to facilitate their employment.
• We are waiving the fees for PVG checks using the trialled eligibility criteria starting from 1 October 2022 until 31 March 2023, in order to alleviate the financial cost of undertaking the required PVG checks prior to joining the social care sector, which in turn will help recruitment.

• We are accelerating this year’s national social care recruitment campaign, using materials and learning from previous campaigns to deliver in the Autumn.
• We are continuing to provide a range of resources including the National Wellbeing Hub, confidential mental health helpline through the Workforce Specialist Service and funding for additional local psychological support.
• We are expanding our trainee doctor workforce by increasing the number of available medical training places. 139 additional trainee doctor posts were created for Autumn 2022 in a variety of specialties, creating additional workforce to meet winter pressures as well as future consultant supply.
• We are incentivising out of hours working for Final Year General Practitioner Training (GPST3s) to increase OOH GP staffing resilience.
• We will continue funding the National Volunteering Coordination Hub run by the British Red Cross until the end March 2023, which acts as a complementary function to NHS Volunteering and Third Sector Interface volunteering mechanisms, and has thus far delivered c.7,500 volunteers equating to c. 59,000 volunteering hours.
• We are implementing our national leadership development programme ‘Leading to Change’, which will include a range of targeted leadership offers for those working in health, social care and social work in order to proactively manage culture change, which will in turn alleviate pressures on retention and recruitment