Hancock: ‘busting bureaucracy’ will help NHS staff

In a speech today, the health and social care secretary will call on the workforce to share which “rules and regulations could be amended”, so staff can “spend less time on paperwork and more time with their patients”.

It coincides with the next installment of the People Plan document this morning, which will detail measures designed to boost recruitment, retention, and staff wellbeing, as well as addressing “new pandemic challenges”.

They include a £10m fund for clinical placements for nurses, midwives, and allied health professionals, along with an increase of 5,000 undergraduate places from September 2020. There will be training grants for 350 nurses to become cancer or chemotherapy specialists.

“The People Plan and a new ‘bureaucracy busting’ call for evidence will work together to find and promote positive changes made before and during the pandemic,” according to a statement from the Department of Health and Social Care.

“This could include allowing staff to use secure messaging services like WhatsApp so patients can benefit from rapid access to information and making it easier to link millions of primary care records to the latest data on coronavirus.”

Mr Hancock said: “Our NHS people deserve to get on with caring for patients and this [covid] crisis has proved there’s bureaucracy that our healthcare system can do better without.

“So I’m urging people across the NHS and social care to speak up about what red tape you can do without to allow you to better deliver the high quality care you are renowned for.”

Some have called for regulation, inspection and system oversight to be dramatically reduced — as it has been during the covid crisis — but the statement makes no commitments to this.

‘Driven by staff’

According to the DHSC, today’s installment of the People Plan “set[s] out focused action that NHS people have said they need right now and or the next six months”. It will state how the NHS can maintain innovations “driven by staff” during the pandemic. The plan has been overseen by NHS England and Improvement, with Health Education England. An earlier “interim” installement was published in June last year.

Local systems will be asked to produce their own People Plans, to ensure their plans for recovery from covid have a “strong focus on the organisation’s people”.

Other measures include:

• Every NHS trust and clinical commissioning group publishing progress against the objective for “every level the workforce [to be] representative of the overall black and ethnic minority workforce”; while covid risk assessments must be completed for vulnerable staff
• Piloting resilience hubs to help staff mental health
• From January 2021, all job roles across NHS England and NHS Improvement will be advertised as being available for flexible working patterns
• An international marketing campaign through 2020-21
• A quarterly staff survey to better track morale on top of the current annual survey

The DHSC confirmed a further part of the NHS People Plan would be published later in the year, once the government spending review has confirmed future NHS education and training budgets.

NHS England chief people officer Prerana Issar said: “This plan aims to make real and lasting change in our NHS to benefit our hardworking staff. It includes practical actions based on what our people tell us matters to them, including a more equal, inclusive and flexible organisation.

“The pandemic has created huge challenges, but it has also highlighted the courage and innovation we are capable of in the most difficult of times.”

In response to the increase in nursing university places, the Royal College of Nursing’s director for England Mike Adams said: “When there are tens of thousands of unfilled nursing jobs, we expect to see greater ambition from government – that includes supporting would-be nurses with their fees and maintenance costs.

“These kind of announcements, on their own, are not enough. By the time they finish their education, these students will be left in debt which, for many, will never be paid off.”