The new Labour government will be taking a ‘thoughtful and evidence-led’ approach to workforce reform, the health secretary Wes Streeting has said.
Speaking at an Institute for Government fringe event at the Labour Conference yesterday (23 September), Mr Streeting said another top-down reorganisation was the ‘last thing’ he wanted to do.
He added that he would be the ‘most popular person in the land’ if he were to say they would sack lots of NHS managers, but that is not the approach he will be taking.
He said: ‘In 1997, we promised to cut waiting lists by sacking NHS managers. We did not do that this [election] and we are taking a thoughtful and evidence-led approach to thinking about workforce reform, which is both making sure we’ve got really good, well-trained managers doing the right things in the right places, and on the clinical side, making sure we’ve got the right clinicians in the right places too.’
Speaking on the long-term workforce plan, he said they were ‘about to start’ engagement for their 10-year plan for health and would be looking at the workforce plan in light of this.
‘For now, it’s kind of steady as she goes, but we will obviously want to take a look at the workforce plan in light of the 10-year plan and provide that stability and certainty for the system to plan for the long-term workforce,’ he said.
Mr Streeting added that he was ‘a man in a hurry to fix our NHS and social care system’. He said that creative solutions could be used to reduce waiting lists, for example organising clinics differently and the ‘smart use’ of technology and data.
‘It’s a bit like getting the elective backlog down like, almost like a Formula One pit stop. So, you organise your clinic to do a large number of hips or knees on a single day and you design your surgery team and set up in a way that enables you to get far more patients through,’ he suggested.
He noted that there is already ‘exceptional practice’ going on across the NHS, saying ‘the NHS has more pilots than the RAF’.
‘If I could just adopt and roll out across the country things that have proven to work, I would have done a hell of a lot of good for the country,’ he said.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves also spoke on Monday, saying there would be no return to austerity and that the government would be delivering a plan to get waiting lists for the NHS down.
It comes after Lord Darzi’s review of the state of the NHS hailed neighbourhood working as the way forward for the health service.
