New national advisory board to tackle workforce issues

Details of the workforce advisory board, which will be chaired by Health Education England, were unveiled in the planning guidance for 2015-16, published today.

The board will include “senior membership from across the system” in order to develop new workforce models and support the wider system as it moves towards new models of care and associated workforce changes.

The planning guidance sets out four areas of initial focus for the board. These include efforts to improve staff retention and attract former healthcare workers to return to roles suffering from shortages such as nursing, emergency medicine and GPs.

It will also be used to offer support to what NHS England regards as “challenged health economies” where workforce shortages are exacerbating problems.

Other areas of work for the new board will be on identifying new roles to deliver the ambitions set out in the NHS England Five Year Forward View, although the guidance gives no further detail on what this might be. It will also look at the training and skills of the workforce ahead of new care models coming into force.

The planning guidance also reveals plans for a “revitalised” National Quality Board, or NQB, to “provide collective leadership for quality across the system”.

This board will review the state of quality of care in the NHS using Care Quality Commission inspections, identify the barriers to making improvements and “develop new system-wide approaches”.

The guidance added: “By summer 2015, the NQB will publish its priorities and work programme, taking steps towards building a single framework for consistently measuring quality across providers, commissioners and regulators.”

Howard Catton, policy director at the Royal College of Nursing, told HSJ he welcomed a national workforce board, adding: “We have highlighted for some time that there is a need for a much closer alignment between workforce and service planning.

“We think this could be extremely helpful in providing and coordinating a more immediate focus on what needs to be done in the short to medium term. It will allow a space for a more genuine multidisciplinary discussion.”