It will take more than a recruitment drive to fix the NHS staffing crisis

This letter was first published in The Guardian

The ever growing gap between the available workforce and that which is needed to keep the NHS running means we need to overhaul how many elements of health and social care are delivered. The Covid-19 vaccination programme highlighted the ability to use new mechanisms – it wasn’t only registered healthcare professionals who delivered jabs into arms, but also skilled and experienced people from wider backgrounds.

It’s time to take the lessons from the vaccine rollout and apply them throughout the NHS, starting with areas with a high risk of staff turnover or understaffing where competency at particular tasks can be achieved under careful supervision, akin to resuscitation training, and undertaken readily by a wider group of volunteers, freeing up our highly skilled healthcare professionals to carry out other work that they are trained for.