Smart technology, satisfied staff?

“Young healthcare professionals are voicing their frustrations, and we need to listen”, says Dr. Katie Baker, Director of UK & Ireland at Swedish company Tandem Health. “Many enter the NHS driven by a passion for patient care, yet they find themselves overwhelmed by administrative tasks that take up hours of their day. 

AI-powered medical scribes like Tandem claim to “reduce admin time by up to two hours per day, allowing clinicians to spend more time with patients and less time on paperwork. By integrating seamlessly with NHS systems, it improves workflows without adding complexity or disruption“. 

Source: https://www.tandemhealth.ai/press

The "No" New Hospital Building programme 

According to the Health Services Journal, planned hospital rebuilds have been pushed so far into the future that NHS insiders believe they may never happen. Building will not start for another 10 years - at the earliest - for some trusts, including Imperial College Healthcare Trust and Lancashire Teaching Hospitals Foundation Trust. Others who were once frontrunners, such as Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust, must wait at least seven years.

A programme director at one trust said the only building projects that were guaranteed were those within the current parliamentary term, likely to run to 2028, and where funding has already been identified. “If you’re after that, there is very little certainty of what will happen when”. A different provider said there was a“strong chance” the delay “have killed the scheme”. Another adds: “So now lets’ just rebadge this as The "No" New Hospital Building programme”

Source: Delayed hospital rebuilds may never happen, trusts fear  Zoe Tidman  HSJ  21 February 2025

Changing behaviours in the NHS workforce. 

Key issues facing the NHS are ensuring that sufficient numbers of staff want to stay in their current roles while working sufficient hours, as well as ensuring there is a pipeline of new recruits to meet changes in skills and loss of staff from retirement or other reasons. There are already indications that people coming into the workforce more recently may not make the same career choices as previous generations. For example, we know that:

• There has been a dramatic fall in nursing graduates joining the NHS after training: 6,325 fewer new nurses with a UK nationality joined NHS hospital and community services in the year to March 2022 compared with the same period two years before that (a fall of 32%).

• Fewer doctors move directly from training to a specialism: in 2012 two-thirds (66%) of doctors completing foundation training entered specialty training in the NHS within a year, whereas a decade later the proportion had fallen to a quarter (25%).

• More GPs are working part-time: for example, in the year to September 2024, GP joiners  were contracted to work 3.5 hours less on average than the joiners eight years prior.

Older age groups are generally more satisfied at work, while those aged between 41 and 65 are more likely to undertake more unpaid hours of work. The combined impact of public sector pay restraint and higher cost of living may explain the fact that staff in younger age groups are more likely than other age groups to work longer paid hours and are least satisfied with pay. Younger staff are also less satisfied with other aspects of work, and more likely to experience work-related stress. Younger workers have always been less likely to undertake unpaid extra hours than older workers, and this pattern has not changed over time.

Source: Bea Taylor, Sarah Scobie, Dr Billy Palme What does the NHS staff survey tell us about the changing behaviours and motivation of health care staff? Nuffield Trust 20/2/25

Brace Position!

If you are anti-PFI you are not going to like this. Many of the widely repeated arguments against PFI are mostly nonsense. Steve Black has bravely repeated them in the HSJ. Few critics seem to grasp the core problems of NHS capital spending and therefore cannot understand why private finance might be useful. A bit of political education is wanted. Some PFI critics think there is nothing wrong with the NHS capital spending process, its’ all a conspiracy about private sector corruption.

Improving NHS productivity requires much more capital investment. The NHS has half the capital employed per staff member of most health systems, which is why it has a productivity problem. The NHSs’ maintenance backlog alone is larger than the annual capital spends. The assumption that the NHS has been starved of capital by privatizers or by Treasury Mandarins is naive. Stabilisation of funding is needed. A private finance initiative that prevented money from being diverted elsewhere in the NHS would have merits. 

Source:  Steve Black  The myth buster: Reviving the PFI is the only realistic option to boost capital funding  HSJ 23/2/25

Dentistry decline continues

There are decreasing numbers of NHS dentists and with morale already known to be very low among the NHS dentistry workforce, the worry is that more and more NHS dentists will consider their long-term career options. 

NHS dentists in England in 2022/23 spent an average of 24.8 hours per week on NHS work (70% of their working week), which was down from 27.3 hours (74% of their working week) in 2018/19 – a decrease of 2.5 hours. If an NHS dental appointment can take up to 30 minutes that would equate to at least five fewer NHS appointments per dentist per week.

Source: Fisher E (2025) “Are NHS dentists doing less NHS work?”, Chart of the week, Nuffield Trust