Staff will quit if not given ‘time to recover’, says NHSE director

Matthew Winn, NHSE’s director of community health and Cambridgeshire Community Services Trust chief executive, set out his concerns in a paper for discussion at his trust’s board meeting today.

The public warning by a prominent NHS leader comes amid concerns among some senior trust leaders that the long-standing issue is not receiving enough attention at national level, HSJ understands.

While the service is grappling to keep tabs on the number of staff it is losing because of compulsory vaccination plans, the issue of staff leaving because of burnout is harder to quantify, but a huge concern to NHS leaders. Nearly two years of tackling coronavirus has taken a huge emotional and physical toll on a large proportion of the workforce and burnout was a growing issue even before the pandemic.

Mr Winn’s paper says: “As the NHS starts to focus on recovering from the current covid pressures, it is vital that the national, regional and local planning must take into consideration that our staff need time to recover and that they cannot (for example) be expected to catch up on the waiting lists that have accrued, without time and resources to support them.

“In the absence of such an approach, I fear that we will see increasing numbers of resignations and the care we will be able to provide will be far short of the standards we set ourselves and that the public expects from us.”

In response to Mr Winn’s comments, NHS Providers chief Chris Hopson said that while trust leaders were working hard to try to ensure their teams had sufficient time off, “our recent survey [found] 99 per cent were concerned about current levels of burnout across the workforce”.

He added: “A failure to [ensure staff have a reasonable workload] runs the very real risk that staff will leave the profession.

“It is vital that national leaders take a longer-term approach to workforce planning and commit to a fully costed and funded workforce strategy across the NHS. This needs to run alongside further investment in wellbeing initiatives to support staff.”

The report sets out how following the NHS moving to a level 4 national incident due to the spread of omicron in December the trust services deemed temporarily non-essential were paused so that staff could be redeployed under mutual aid approaches to help deliver the national booster programme.

The report adds: “Our entire staff group has undergone huge change over the past two months and I would like to publicly thank and applaud them for their adaptability and sheer dedication to providing care for our local residents. Every member of staff has had to manage work with less colleagues around them or stop their normal job and do something entirely different.

“This has meant (for example) corporate staff and MSK physios training to undertake vaccinations; staff being re-deployed to support hospital discharge services and other staff remaining in their jobs but undertaking the work of three other people to provide essential cover of functions.

Danny Mortimer, chief executive of NHS Employers, said: “We came into the pandemic with significant staff shortages and those colleagues that have worked throughout the pandemic have been incredibly stretched. As we look towards recovering services, there is a risk that if expectations around what can be delivered are unrealistic the NHS will lose valued people.

“NHS organisations are committed to innovation and working in different ways to cut waiting lists and deliver more services to meet demand, but we also need politicians to be realistic about what can be achieved by a stretched and depleted workforce.”

Health and social care secretary Sajid Javid committed to the health select committee in November that a 15 year-plan to set up a strategic framework for the long-term workforce needed across health and social care would be published by “roughly” in the spring.