A further 350 places will be added to the NHS graduate management training scheme by 2020, Health Education England (HEE) chief executive Professor Ian Cumming has announced.
Speaking yesterday (14 June) at Confed18 in Manchester, Professor Cumming said HEE is looking at expanding both the clinical and non-clinical NHS workforce.
He said: ‘It is not only on the clinical workforce that we are expanding numbers.
‘We can also announce that we are increasing the size of the graduate management training scheme from 150 last year to 200 this year through to 500 by 2020.’
The graduate management training scheme has been running since 1956 and has contributed to producing leaders such as Sir David Nicholson, former chief executive of the NHS.
‘Break the barriers’
In answer to a question from a member of the Confed audience on how the expansion of the graduate management training scheme will be managed, health and social care secretary Jeremy Hunt – who also spoke at Confed18 – said that more needs to be done to ensure clinicians consider managerial roles.
He said: ‘We need to dramatically increase the size of the pipeline of people going to those [managerial] roles and I think we need to break down the barriers that stop clinicians wanting to move into management roles.
‘At the moment, they look at management sometimes with the view that it’s the dark side, with concerns that they will not be able to keep up the clinical practice and sometimes frankly they are worried because managers seem to have a very high turnover.’
Mr Hunt added that more stability and a more structured talent management programme are needed to ensure this happens and hinted at the work NHS Improvement chair Dido Harding is doing to ensure this happens.
Building the workforce
Prof Cumming also announced that HEE decided to put extra money in the CPD budget for this year, which will be ‘17% higher than last year’, when it was £83m.
Referring to the budgetary increase, he said that ‘it is still not enough’ and that more needs to be done to invest in the present NHS workforce, ‘to retain them and to give them the skills that they need’.
In order to meet demand, we will need 190,000 more members of staff in the NHS in 2027 than we had in 2017, Prof Cumming explained.
He said: ‘If we do nothing, other than what we were doing last year, we would produce 75,000 additional members of staff by 2027 – giving us a gap of 115,000.
‘We also believe that that 190,000 is the lower end of what we are really going to need. We believe that the workforce needs to grow by between 3%-5% per annum.
‘Our current growth projections will not deliver between 3% and 5% increase in the workforce every year for the next 10 years.’
