HEE must wait for allocations

Speaking at the Commons Health and Social Care Committee’s inquiry into how the NHS will clear the activity backlog created by the Covid pandemic, he also announced that an elective action plan is due to be published before the end of this month. A workforce plan covering broader health and social care staffing will follow in 2022.

Last week’s Budget and spending review did not include details of the future Health Education England (HEE) funding, much to the frustration of trusts.

At a previous meeting of the Commons committee inquiry, NHS chief executive Amanda Pritchard said any reduction in the HEE budget in the spending review and Budget would be a concern. Mr Hunt said the committee had ‘raced’ to the HEE budget section of the spending review documents and found ‘zilch’. Could Mr Javid (pictured) tell the committee what was happening with HEE spending?

‘Not yet,’ the minister replied. ‘Now that we know exactly what the settlement is, we are still making some final decisions, working with HEE, working with the NHS, and making those final allocations. So, we are still working through those, and I couldn’t say what they are right now because the process is not complete.’

Mr Hunt said he understood this, but asked the health and social care secretary if he could understand the unease in the NHS that future HEE funding was uncertain and, as yet, there was no workforce plan for reducing the elective backlog. ‘It feels like a lack of direction, a lack of specificity in terms of what’s happening with workforce,’ Mr Hunt added.

Mr Javid acknowledged that the focus on long-term workforce planning and budgets was natural, given the current pressures on the NHS. But he insisted the spending review settlement has just been made for the whole Department, and allocations to individual programmes had to be worked through.

Pressed on the need for a workforce plan in the short term, Mr Javid said the NHS elective recovery plan will include detail of how it will meet its staffing requirements to achieve the plan. ‘We have our own internal estimates [of workforce need], and now we know our financial settlement for the Department and the NHS, we will be working on fine tuning that,' he said.

‘When it comes to electives, in our delivery plan we will set out how we would hope to meet both short-term and long-term needs in terms of workforce. But of course, there’s a broader workforce need beyond electives, for example in primary care, community hospitals and social care.

‘That is a separate piece of work already commenced by HEE. It’s a 15-year plan to set up a strategic framework for long-term workforce need. The timeframe for that is, roughly, spring next year and the reason for that is that HEE are consulting broadly and widely.’