Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the effect of changes in the level of workforce vacancies on patient care; and if he will support doctors reaching retirement to continue working if they wish by promoting flexible working opportunities.

There is no historic robust vacancy data showing changes in the level of workforce vacancies.

The vast majority of patients are continuing to receive world class high quality and prompt care, against a backdrop of increasing demand. The overwhelming majority of patients waiting to start planned treatment are seen and treated within a maximum of 18 weeks, with the current average wait around six weeks if these patients are being treated as an outpatient and 10 weeks if they need to be admitted to hospital.

Employers are responsible for engaging doctors about their plans for retirement as they approach their ‘normal pension age’[1].The Government is supporting doctors who want to continue working after reaching retirement age by offering a range of flexible options including working fewer days or hours and options to work in less demanding roles involving fewer responsibilities.

The Department published its ‘Guidance on the re-employment of staff in receipt of their NHS Pension Scheme benefits’ in July 2017. The ‘retire and return’ policy aims to:

- Enable the National Health Service to retain the skills, knowledge and experience necessary to deliver patient care;

- Help support the health and wellbeing of older staff as they approach retirement and wish to continue working; and

- Ensure that the overall workforce costs are managed in line with budgets.

Employers should have clear policies and procedures to deal with ‘retire and return’ applications, so they can demonstrate they have considered business and financial needs when assessing cases. Other flexible retirement options exist to support NHS staff that are approaching or working beyond normal pension age.

More details are available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/re-employing-staff-who-receive-an-nhs-pension

NHS Digital publish figures on advertised posts, derived from ‘NHS Jobs’, the recruitment website used by NHS trusts, and NHS Improvement has begun a monthly collection of staff vacancies from NHS providers which, since September 2017, is published in their quarterly report of the NHS provider sector. Seasonal effects have a large impact on vacancies and as a time series of this data is not yet available, we are currently unable to accurately interpret the data for these effects, making meaningful conclusions hard to draw.

NHS Digital are actively working with NHS Improvement and others to define and publish the various data on a more consistent basis.

Notes:

¹Normal pension ages in the NHS Pension scheme are 60, 65 and state pension age for the 1995, 2008 and 2015 NHS Pension Schemes respectively.