Workforce issues
more effective treatment for patients, insourcing providers relieve a burden from senior healthcare professionals, allowing them to focus on more pressing matters. While many Trusts continue to use out-dated equipment due to budgetary restrictions, private providers are able to invest heavily into the latest technology, which not only delivers efficiency gains, but can also help to attract, support, and retain insourced staff who are seeking to improve their own skills. As well as this, by providing training opportunities to insourced staff alongside the Trust’s own staff, insourcing organisations support the up-skilling of the wider workforce and integration between the two teams. By broadening the pool of talent able to perform skilled operations or diagnostic tests, insourcing providers are helping to deliver more operations at pace, supporting the NHS to tackle the elective backlog.
Delivering innovation and training opportunities One area in particular where insourcing staff have had an especially positive impact has been in the field of endoscopy. Endoscopy is one of the most in-demand procedures across the country but there is a substantial shortage of endoscopists, and nurses trained in endoscopy. Training can take a year and developing experienced members of staff takes several, making it difficult to make progress with tackling backlogs. Insourcing providers have been investing in
their own staff to support the field of endoscopy and have also offered substantial benefits to Trust staff in terms of training opportunities. One such provider of this training is Remedy Healthcare Solutions who, alongside their own team, provides a training offering to Trust staff from their in-house clinical experts. These training opportunities have been found to be especially popular among junior staff and nurses wanting to move into endoscopy. Within the field of endoscopy, a relatively new
type of procedure – trans-nasal endoscopy – has become more common outside of the UK and is a procedure whereby much smaller and thinner scopes are placed through a patient’s nose, rather than in the patient’s throat. While trans- nasal procedures have typically been avoided by Trusts in favour of traditional endoscopy procedures due to their diagnostic-only purposes, the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in a growth in popularity of the procedure. This is because patients can undergo trans-nasal procedures while covering their mouths, thus decreasing the likelihood of the virus spreading. In contrast, traditional throat endoscopy procedures can often cause retching and coughing, increasing opportunities to spread
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contagious particles from the patient’s mouth. In addition to being more COVID-friendly, the
procedures can also be completed without patient sedation, meaning the entire process can take around 10-15 minutes. The rapid turnaround time of this procedure allows patients the opportunity to return to work and their other daily activities as normal. Through these quicker procedures, more patients can be seen, meaning backlogs and waiting lists can be reduced at a more rapid rate. Remedy Healthcare Solutions is currently the only on-site provider of hands-on trans-nasal endoscopy training in the UK and their team has over 15 years’ experience in these procedures. Remedy is keen to see more Trusts use trans- nasal endoscopies as a way to cut waiting lists and treat more patients, and Remedy has recently started to train clinicians at King’s College Hospital NHS Trust in trans-nasal endoscopies, sharing their skills with the NHS workforce. Continuing with the theme of endoscopy, an example of innovation currently being assessed by Remedy Healthcare is the utilisation of single- use endoscopy scopes compared to reusable scopes. Reusable scopes are expensive, the decontamination process is time-consuming, and in order to see the investment pay off, the reusable scopes have to be used for 5-7+ years; this does not allow for innovations in the latest technology. Remedy is in a unique position to be able to
evaluate the merits of single-use endoscopy scopes that are cheaper, do not require decontamination, and also ensure the latest technology can be used. Making such assessments around technology and equipment further works to reduce the burden on NHS professionals as private providers can assess the outcomes of new innovations before they are implemented on a large-scale across the NHS, which can be expensive if not thoroughly tested beforehand.
Embedding resilience with improved insourcing operations Though insourcing has a positive contribution to the health sector, there has developed a short- termism within the profession that has led to
a culture of insourced staff being employed on short contracts at hospitals located long distances from their homes, and the resulting longer travel times and greater accommodation costs is leading to low retention in these roles. This creates significant turnover in the number of insourced staff at a particular Trust and is unsustainable given the size of the challenge facing the NHS workforce. Rather than viewing insourcing as a
temporary fix, it is crucial that the sector challenges its perception of the service and properly considers how insourced staff can be used appropriately to embed long-term resilience in the NHS workforce. As part of this, it is imperative that policymakers and healthcare leaders prioritise solutions that ensure existing staff do not become overworked or burnt out, leading to their eventual exit from the healthcare workforce altogether. Indeed, it is also essential that insourcing
organisations adapt their practices to ensure that they are preparing the NHS to tackle the magnitude of the crisis and ensure that they are delivering benefits to a given Trust that outlast their time at the facility, creating a positive legacy. For example, making commitments to sourcing staff from areas local to the Trust facility to ensure that travel time and overnight costs are minimal (increasing the likelihood of an insourced employee returning to the place of work) would be a starting point for insourcing organisations to make traction in this area. These measures work to reduce the burden on the healthcare workforce and create an environment where insourced staff can seamlessly support existing healthcare staff to optimise efficiency and, most importantly, deliver positive patient outcomes. This measure also helps to retain healthcare talent. The winter season is set to present
unprecedented challenges to the health and social care sectors, so it is essential that the standards and expectations within the insourcing profession are uplifted to promote a genuinely comprehensive and sustainable solution to the crisis facing the healthcare workforce.
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