Workforce issues
Why apprenticeships must be part of the workforce plan
Apprenticeships are the missing piece of the puzzle to reduce staff shortages and treatment waiting times. They can also promote diversity, says Professor Lynne Gell, Dean of the School of Nursing, at BPP.
It’s no secret NHS wait times are at historical highs – with new stories linked to waiting lists making headlines almost daily. Moreover, a recent BBC News investigation found that NHS patients are facing delays on ‘hidden’ waiting lists that do not show up in the official figures in England.1
While the published waiting list stands
at around 7.6 million, the true magnitude of the backlog seems to be significantly higher. Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, recently admitted
that not enough progress has been made to reduce NHS waiting lists.2
Latest NHS figures
show that the number of people who waited more than 12 hours in A&E departments in England increased by nearly 25% in January, compared to December 2023. These challenges are being felt across every
corner of the NHS too. Data from the British Heart Foundation3
reveals that NHS waiting lists
for cardiac care have doubled in less than three years with hundreds of thousands facing delays that can be life-threatening. Cardiac waiting lists rose to 408,061 at the end of January 2024, in England, compared to 203,893 in February 2021. A similar issue prevails in cancer care. More than a third of cancer patients in England are facing potentially fatal delays.4
There’s a myriad of reasons for these delays, including the
Apprenticeships within the NHS to boost staff numbers In a bid to widen access into medicine and boost staff numbers, the Government also announced new routes into the NHS alongside the plan – the most noteworthy being pilot funding for medical apprenticeships. Due to start in September this year, the medical apprenticeships will provide a different, vocational career route into
chronic workforce shortages across the NHS. Recent estimates show5
that without additional
policy intervention and workforce planning, the nursing workforce will grow more slowly than it is currently or will decline, with a projected supply-demand gap of 140,600 nurses in the NHS in England by 2030/31. To address the significant staff shortages within the NHS, the NHS Long-Term Workforce Plan was published in June 2023, which outlined plans to address a shortfall of between 260,000 and 360,000 staff by 2036-2037. Backed by a £2.4 billion government
investment, the plan aims to increase the number of nurses working in the NHS by 50,000 by 2024, improve staff morale, increase flexible working options for NHS staff to reduce stresses, and support former staff to return to work.
the profession. Available to anyone with the required entry qualifications, the Government hopes that one in six medical professionals will now be trained through apprenticeships from this year on. Of course, this isn’t the first-time apprenticeships have been harnessed across the NHS. There are more than 350 routes into NHS
careers via apprenticeships, with nursing apprenticeships arguably the most successful. Introduced in September 2017, more than 6,000 nurses enrolled on nursing degree apprenticeships in England, during the first five years of the scheme’s launch. The medical doctor degree apprenticeship is seeking to mirror that success, providing a different route into medicine for school leavers and careers switchers for the first time. The programme is designed to give aspiring doctors the opportunity to learn using a more vocational, hands-on approach – and a different pathway into the sector rather than via the traditional university route. The key difference between a medical
apprenticeship and a traditional medical degree is that apprentices will work as trainees while studying for their degree, with the additional benefit of earning a salary while they learn.
June 2024 I
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