Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps she is taking to improve recruitment and retention to deliver her Department's integrated one workforce approach.

The NHS Long Term Workforce Plan sets out how we will meet the workforce needs of the future, through increasing training numbers and reforming training, working differently, and taking action to retain more staff. The plan recommends that integrated care boards (ICBs) and wider system partners prioritise actions that drive recruitment and retention of multi-disciplinary teams, in a one workforce approach.

There are a number of key national programmes aimed at supporting regions, ICBs, and providers with recruitment challenges, in growing the workforce. For example, the Overhauling Recruitment programme aims to overhaul and modernise National Health Service recruitment by encouraging innovation and wider access into NHS careers, supporting the growth of a diverse and skilled workforce to meet future demands on healthcare. NHS England will soon be engaging with ICBs and providers to support and enable this transformational change, as it prepares to publish the overhauling recruitment strategic delivery framework.

The NHS Long Term Workforce Plan also sets out how to improve culture and leadership to ensure that up to 130,000 fewer staff leave the NHS over the next 15 years. Key to this is the National Retention Programme. The programme builds on the NHS People Promise, and supports integrated care systems (ICSs), which are made up of ICBs and integrated care partnerships, regions, NHS trusts, and organisations, to improve employee experience and retain their people, and thereby reduce the NHS staff leaver rates.

Support for organisations and ICSs can be accessed via the Retention Hub, which outlines initiatives mapped against the People Promise, access to tools, guides, and case studies to enable improvements and contact details for regional colleagues support the retention agenda in each of the seven regions. Further information is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/looking-after-our-people/the-programme-and-resources/