Our workforce investigation will provoke and inspire

If the NHS is to achieve the step-change in efficiency set out in the Five Year Forward View, then the way in which its clinical workforce operates must change significantly.

At the same time, the NHS faces the task of meeting the government’s commitment to delivering a service that is more accessible and offers higher quality outside normal working hours.

This also presents a profound challenge to the working methods of the service’s clinicians.

For this reason, among many others, HSJ is launching a special investigation focusing on the productivity of the NHS’s clinical workforce, with a particular focus on the pressing need to reduce the current escalating expenditure on temporary staffing.

We will seek to produce a report which will speak directly to the needs, concerns and ambitions of healthcare leaders.

‘We will produce a report which will speak directly to the needs, concerns and ambitions of healthcare leaders’

It will be written by Sally Gainsbury, a journalist who has just left the Financial Times investigation unit to become a senior policy analyst for the Nuffield Trust. She is also, of course, a former HSJ news editor.

As part of her research, Sally will be interviewing a series of experts and very senior leaders in the health service. Our report partner is HCL Workforce Solutions. HCL is one of the country’s leading healthcare recruitment businesses whose insight derived from the day to day experience of dealing with the workforce challenges faced by the NHS will add significant value to the report.

HSJ will, as ever, retain total control over the report’s content and recommendations.

We hope our investigation into this mission critical issue will provide both provocation and inspiration.

Alastair McLellan is editor of HSJ