Following the news that a leading group of UK lawmakers reported that the NHS is facing its greatest workforce crisis;
Dean Sabri, Principal Analyst for Health and Social Care at GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company, offers his view:
“NHS Trusts are well aware of the staffing crisis in the sector. NHS Digital vacancy data* shows that in October 2019, prior to the pandemic, NHS hospitals, mental health services and community providers reported a shortage of over 100,000 FTE staff, 10% of which were nursing vacancies. The current workforce crisis is nothing new to NHS leaders, however, it appears that in the last year organizations are taking a serious look at how technology can free up staff time.
“The committee’s report called for the health and care visa scheme to be reformed to attract overseas workers, but organizations themselves need to employ techniques to retain more staff in the meantime. This means investing in digital technologies, which can carry out some of the menial tasks that take clinicians away from patients including data transcription between systems and sharing medical images.
“Organizations already aware of this reality have been busy procuring products and services to make efficiencies in staff time. In the last 12 months, 22 contracts have been awarded for automation technologies, a 100% increase since last year. This is a trend set to continue as more Trusts struggle with staffing numbers and automation technologies become ever more advanced, with the next step likely to be further expansion into automated decision-making utilizing AI.”
*Information taken from NHS Digital Data https://digital.nhs.uk/data-
