NHS Recovery Plan: annual progress update

Staffing and Wellbeing

Our health and social care workforce is one of Scotland’s biggest assets – highly skilled, diverse, dedicated and motivated. The nation owes the NHS and social care workforce a debt of thanks. We will continue to invest in our workforce whilst putting in place the long-term reforms which are needed to ensure we reduce backlogs, and provide person-centred care, ensuring the NHS in Scotland remains not only a first-class service, but a first-class profession to work in as well.

Steps we have taken

Since the launch of the Recovery Plan, and to aid with winter 21/22 pressures, NHS Scotland had recruited more than 1,000 additional healthcare support staff and almost 200 registered nurses from overseas to help address the unprecedented challenges facing services. By 30 June 2022, overall staffing levels had increased by 2,585.7 WTE posts on the previous year and 28,120.9 WTE post since 2006.

Specifically, we are making progress against the following commitments:

• Thanks to recurring Scottish Government funding of £1 million, Health Boards have taken on international recruitment leads. By April 2022, following the provision of a £4.5 million funding package, offers of employment had been signed with nurses from countries including India and the Philippines. By the end of August 2022, around 230 nurses have taken up offers of employment within Scottish Health Boards. A significant number are now working in hospitals across the country.
• We have exceeded our commitment to recruit 800 additional mental health workers in key settings, including A&E, GP practices, police station custody suite and prisons. 958 WTE mental health roles having now been filled, including 356 posts being recruited within GP settings. In addition, at 31 March 2022, 259.9 WTE mental health workers had been recruited through the Primary Care Improvement Fund. Our significant expansion of the mental health workforce has helped us see record numbers of CAMHS patients for two consecutive quarters.

We have also invested in our staff, through fair pay, increased training and upskilling opportunities, and widening access to careers in health and care:

• We have introduced the Paramedic Student Bursary for all students starting eligible courses in September 2021. Scottish student paramedics, studying in Scotland, will be able to apply for a bursary of £10,000 a year, compared with the £5,000 bursary announced in 2020 by the UK Government for England.
• We have established a Centre for Workforce Supply (CWS) to develop resource strategies and solutions to support Boards to have the right skills, in the right place, at the right time.
• We have established the NHS Scotland Academy, a partnership between NHS Golden Jubilee and NHS Education for Scotland to offer accelerated training for a wide range of health and social care roles and professions. As part of this, the Academy is currently leading the development and delivery of a broad range of bespoke training opportunities in areas including pharmacy, diagnostics, peri-operative practice and anaesthetics, as well as tailored support for staff who have been recruited internationally.
• Investment has been committed to support the NHS Academy’s work to widening access to careers in Scotland’s health and social care for both military service leavers and veterans, as well as through the establishment of the NHS Scotland Youth Academy.
• We are in the process of the delivering the commitment to increase medical undergraduates by 500 places over the course of the Parliamentary term and to double the number of widening access places. The first two tranches of 100 places have been delivered in academic years 21/22 and 22/23, subject to universities successfully filling the places. Widening access places have risen to 90 in 22/23 (from 60) making progress toward that part of the commitment.

We have also now completed a number of the actions set out in the Integrated Workforce Plan, including exceeding our commitment to deliver an additional 500 Advanced Nurse Practitioners, and the creation of training places in cardiac physiology and radiography. As promised, 30 cardiac physiology training places have been funded and filled, with 17 trainees graduating in 2024 and the remaining 13 in 2025. In radiography, all 30 places will be filled by January 2023 and those students are expected to be in the workforce from January 2024. A final report will be published by the Scottish Radiography Transformation Project (SRTP) later this year.

Steps we are taking

The wellbeing of our workforce continues to be a focus and a priority. Over the course of the last year we invested £12 million to support wellbeing and further investment is planned.

The National Wellbeing Hub includes the Workforce Specialist Service, and is providing a primary care-led, multidisciplinary, mental health treatment service that can treat professionals suffering from a range of mental health issues such as stress, anxiety, depression or addiction. There have been over 196,000 users and 620,000 page views on the National Wellbeing Hub website since launch, and we hope our workforce can find concrete advice, useful recommendations and a measure of peace of mind from its multiple offers.

The Workforce Specialist Service (WSS) is available to all regulated professionals working in Health and Care in Scotland, and so has proved to be popular with those who have used the service. Other services for staff include Coaching for Wellbeing, Reflective Practice and the Workforce Development Programme In addition, we promised to publish a National Workforce Strategy for Health and Social Care, and did so on 11 March 2022 in partnership with CoSLA.

We are committed to recruiting an additional 1,500 clinical and non-clinical staff by 2026 for the National Treatment Centres, and are supporting Health Boards to utilise a range of recruitment and retention options to meet this requirement.

Steps we will take

We will soon launch Leading to Change, Scotland’s national leadership development programme that aims to provide support, development and coaching to enable people to apply practical skills to their own leadership. We believe that having effective leadership in place within the NHS workforce is important, and will lead to increased wellbeing for staff and better individual care and outcomes. It will assist systems change across health, social care and social work as well as the recovery from Covid-19. This programme encourages leaders to examine the needs of staff, ensuring their wellbeing is a priority, and to help them deal with rapidly changing situations.

Other key developments include continued delivery of the National Wellbeing Hub, Workforce Specialist Service, Coaching for Wellbeing, Workforce Development Programme and Reflective Practice. Building on this, our new Improving Wellbeing and Workforce Cultures Strategy will be launched shortly.

We will also recruit up to a further 750 nurses, midwives and Allied Health Professionals from overseas this winter to help with the pressures we are likely to face, and to support this, further funding of £7.98 million will be made available to Health Boards.