Key points
- The challenges of recruiting and retaining health professionals and other health staff has eased, with lower vacancy rates, a reduction in international recruitment from non EU countries, and an increase in applications to UK-based training for some of the health professions, but staffing problems remain in some specialities and geographic regions.
- Given the tighter fiscal situation, a key issue for the health sector will now be to improve staff productivity and performance. However, the National Audit Office has raised serious doubts about whether Agenda for Change and the parallel contracts with GPs and consultants have ‘enhanced value for money’. The Department of Health originally predicted that Agenda For Change would produce £1.3 billion productivity savings by 2008/9 but a National Audit Office report says there is no evidence this has happened. GPs’ average earnings rose by 58 per cent from March 2006 to March 2008, for instance, but their weekly workload fell by seven hours. Meanwhile consultants’ pay rose 25 per cent in three years but their average workload fell from 51.6 to 50.2 hours a week.
- There have been significant changes proposed to the system of professional regulation. The UK’s 150,000 doctors will for the first time face annual competence-based tests to establish their fitness to practise, as well as a relicensing process every five years. Those who fail will receive further training or, in extreme cases, will be forced to stop practising.
- All the professional regulatory bodies now have to have at least as many lay as professional members and are subject to external scrutiny from the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence (CHRE). Meanwhile the newly established Office of the Health Professions Adjudicator (OHPA) will make final decisions on medical professionals’ fitness to practise.
- A new independent advisory body, Medical Education England, has been set up to oversee the training and career development of junior doctors as recommended by the Tooke Inquiry. It will advise the Department of Health on the education and training of doctors, dentists, pharmacists and health care scientists. Further work will be carried out to decide whether other health care professions require similar professional advisory boards.
