UK’S NHS hospitals unable to fill thousands of vacant posts
The National Health Service (NHS) in the UK is short of more than 100,000 staff, and some hospitals are struggling to ¿ll as many as 1,600 vacancies, according to new research that has sparked fresh fears about patient safety.
NHS understaf¿ng is so acute that almost one in four posts at some trusts are lying vacant, freedom of information requests by the Labor party show. The vacancy rate has risen over the last year, theguardian.com reported.
Shortages of hospital and community-based doctors, and also nurses, are worsening, according to ¿gures from 82 (36 percent) of the 229 NHS trusts in England.
Between them the 82 trusts had 35,993 un¿lled full-time equivalent posts, representing a nine percent vacancy rate.
If that ¿gure was replicated across all 229 trusts then the NHS as a whole would be short of 100,517 staff, Labour said.
Guy’s and St Thomas’ trust in London had the highest number of vacancies on 31 March — 1,610, which is 10 percent of its overall workforce.
Four other trusts also had more than 1,000 un¿lled posts, including Central Manchester University hospitals (1,304), Heart of England in Birmingham (1,236) and London’s Royal Free (1,225).
However, South London and the Maudsley trust — the NHS’S biggest provider of mental health services — has by far the highest proportion of missing personnel across the health service.
Its 1,258 un¿lled posts represent a 23 percent vacancy rate.
Janet Davies, chief executive and general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, said, “This analysis pulls back the curtain on the state of staffing in the NHS this winter. Despite ministers’ rhetoric on the importance of safety, it will enter a perilous January without enough staff to give safe care.
Labour estimates, based on the ¿gures that the NHS is short of 42,855 nurses, 11,187 doctors to work in hospitals or community services and 12,219 nurse support workers.
Mental health services are experiencing some of the worst understaf¿ng, raising question marks over NHS and ministerial pledges to boost the workforce by 21,000 by 2022.
Vacancy rates are running at 22 percent (362 posts) at North Essex trust and 17 percent (572) at Sussex partnership trust.
Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, said, “For years, the government has failed to ensure enough new recruits coming through in key specialties, while failed policy decisions like the NHS pay cap and the ending of the NHS bursary have contributed to a growing crisis.”
He added, “Trusts are having to spend £3 billion a year on agency and other temporary staff because of workforce shortages they did not create.”