NHS Workforce Expansion

Alex Cunningham Excerpts

Tuesday 28th February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

Staffing in the NHS is at crisis point. Not many days pass before I find myself retweeting a job being advertised by the North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust. These jobs include many senior roles such as consultants, specialist paediatric nurses and theatre staff, but we of course need staff across the trust, and they are not easy to come by. In recent times, nurses have been recruited from as far afield as the Philippines, and they continue to play important roles in our two local hospitals. On Teesside, we desperately need the staff to provide the services to address some of the worst health inequalities in the country. Apart from training the staff, we need them to have a good place in which to work, and I hope that our new diagnostic centre in Stockton town centre will provide the best of working conditions and technology. However, as I always say in health debates, it is a new hospital that we need in Stockton if we are really going to get to grips with those health inequalities.

I would like to concentrate on the staffing and funding challenges facing the palliative care sector. People with a terminal illness rely for their end-of-life care on specialist palliative care workers employed mainly by charitable hospices, and also on generalist health and social care workers. GPs and district and community nurses also play a particularly important role alongside hospice at home services in caring for the increasing numbers of people dying at home. I admire each and every one of them—it is not a job I could do—and we need to ensure that staff get the ongoing support they need, including ongoing professional development, to help to deliver the care that is needed.

Despite the fact that every health and social care worker is likely at some point in their career to be involved in caring for people experiencing dying, death or bereavement, for many, palliative care and end-of-life care training is not currently a compulsory part of either initial training or continuing professional development. This must be addressed to ensure that the entire health and social care workforce are able to provide the end-of-life care we need. Marie Curie, with which I have had the privilege of working over my time in Parliament, has worked up recommendations for the current challenges. It proposes a long-term funding settlement to enable the palliative and end-of-life care sector to attract and retain a workforce sufficient to ensure no one misses out on the care and support they need at the end of their lives.

In the next 25 years, the number of people aged 85 years and over in the UK will almost double—I hope that I will be one of them—so demand for palliative care and end-of-life services will increase due to larger numbers of people living longer, with multiple and complex health conditions, and it is important that every person at the end of their life receives the care and support they need. However, as this debate has laid bare, there is a real crisis in training and recruitment across the NHS, and it is reflected in the palliative care sector. The failures in training and recruitment are damaging our ability to deliver care to some of our most needy people—people at the very end of their lives. Only Labour’s plans will put it right. It is time for that general election.