By Greg Dawson
NHS bosses are turning to online parenting forums as a way to entice nurses who have left their jobs to rejoin again.
This has been released in part of the interim People Plan, setting a target of recruiting and extra 40,000 nurses over the next five years by:
- International recruitment
- Ensuring more nurses enter training
- Improving retention rate by placing greater emphasis on career development
- Encouraging nurses back with flexible working opportunities
The plan for the link up focuses mainly on nurses, it does mention the need for doctors and other support staff. Worries are the 40,000 nurses target would only fill the current posts that are lacking nurses reducing the vacancy rate from 8% to 5%.
There are still pressures the NHS faces that are not related to the lack of staff,
In 2018 a staff survey was taken by 1.1 million NHS employees which revealed 56.5% said they carried on with their duties while feeling unwell.
39.8% of works reported they were feeling unwell due to work related stress over the past 12 months, the highest proportion of stress workers the survey documented in the last five years.
Dido Harding, Chair of NHS Improvement said “We need to change the way people work in the NHS and create a modern caring and exciting workplace”
Health Secretary Matt Hancock added: “we must make the NHS an employer to be proud of.“
See here for survey results:
https://www.nhsstaffsurveys.com/Caches/Files/ST18_National%20briefing_FINAL_20190225.pdf
https://www.nhsstaffsurveys.com/Page/1064/Latest-Results/2018-Results/