100,000 full-time staff needed for NHS, says new report

Skills shortages are severely impacting on England’s biggest employer, the NHS, with one in eleven posts unfilled, according to the Edge Foundation.

There are 41,000 nurse vacancies alone, but also problems in medicine, adult social care and particularly in mental health. The education charity highlights research by the Health Foundation in its latest commentary on skills shortages in the UK. Numbers of nurse undergraduates dropped by four per cent last year; it’s predicted the shortage of nurses alone will reach 70,000 within five years if action isn’t taken.

The report exposes the severity of skills shortages across the wider UK economy with 68 per cent of UK employers saying they have struggled to find workers with the skills they need in the previous year.

Furthermore, 92 per cent of companies say soft skills matter as much or more than hard skills; a third of the working age population have few or no qualifications; 1.5 million jobs are at high risk of automation, according to ONS; and more than 70 per cent of the jobs most at risk are currently held by women.

Olly Newton, Edge’s Director of Policy and Research, said: “By bringing together analysis from across organisations and sectors, we can see this is a perfect storm. The fact that employers struggle to recruit because candidates don’t have the skills they need, shows the depth of the schism between education policy and industrial strategy.

“The so-called ‘soft skills’ that people need to secure employment, should be called ‘critical skills’ because these are the skills, behaviours and aptitudes we need in the workplace now and to adapt to the jobs of the future. It is women, younger people and those with lower levels of skills-who are most vulnerable to being replaced by computer programs, algorithms or robots. We should be mapping our curriculum and life-long learning offer to the skills we need for 21st century jobs, not to the 19th century notion that exam grades are the only measure of talent and ability.”