Thinktanks say crisis in health service will mean some of its £20.5bn boost never gets spent

The staffing crisis in the NHS is deepening so fast that the service could be short of 350,000 key personnel by 2030, health experts have warned.

Staff shortages are set to become so serious that they force patients to wait longer for treatment, hit the quality of care offered and mean some of the NHS’s £20.5bn funding boost never gets spent.

The warning comes from an analysis of the NHS’s increasingly visible lack of doctors, nurses and other staff drawn up by three leading health thinktanks. The situation is so serious that the NHS is reaching a tipping point, they claim.

“Unless new NHS staff can quickly be recruited and trained, the NHS simply will not have the workers available to meet the demand for healthcare expected over the next decade.”

The NHS in England is already short of over 100,000 staff, including 10,000 doctors and 40,000 nurses, official figures show. However, on current trends, analysts project that the gap between staff needed and the number available could reach almost 250,000 by 2020.

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“If the emerging trend of staff leaving the workforce early continues and the pipeline of newly trained staff and international recruits does not rise sufficiently, this number could be more than 350,000 by 2030,” according to the briefing by the King’s Fund, Nuffield Trust and Health Foundation.

A lack of 250,000 staff would mean that about one in six of all NHS posts were unfilled. The NHS employs about 1.2 million people.

The experts blame the situation on “an incoherent approach to workforce policy at a national level, poor workforce planning, restrictive immigration policies and inadequate funding for training places”. Funding for education and training of staff has been cut by £2bn since 2006, it says.

The thinktanks’ warning comes a day after Matt Hancock, the health and social care secretary, said the NHS was worryingly short of nurses, GPs and mental health staff. Although record numbers of young doctors are training to become GPs, “there are also some people leaving the profession in too large numbers, and moving from full-time to part-time”, he said.

The NHS plan will include measures to improve the training of health professionals, ensure the continued recruitment of staff from abroad and try to persuade those working for internal NHS staff “banks” to become salaried instead, he told the HSJ website in an interview.

Dido Harding, the chair of NHS Improvement, which regulates the health service’s finances, last month acknowledged the seriousness of its recruitment and retention problems when she said: “The single biggest problem in the NHS at the moment is that we don’t have enough people wanting to work in it.”

The UK already has low numbers of doctors and nurses per head of population by international standards, the thinktanks added. For example, it has one doctor for every 356 people, whereas comparable countries have one medic for every 227 people.

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NHS bosses led by the NHS England chief executive, Simon Stevens, who are finalising long-term plans for the health service – which will set out how the £20.5bn is spent – need to include in it a “credible workforce strategy” that plans for an oversupply of NHS staff, given the recruitment problems, the report says.

“The NHS is overstretched and services are being compromised by serious staff shortages. As things stand, this problem will only get worse over the next decade, putting access and quality of care at risk,” said Prof Anita Charlesworth, director of economics at the Health Foundation.

Cancer Research UK said the NHS’s cancer workforce would need to double by 2027 or hospitals would not be able to care properly for the growing number of patients being diagnosed.

Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, blamed staff shortages on government mismanagement of the NHS and the financial squeeze the service has been going through since 2010.