BMA highlights role of flexible working in NHS workforce

As part of its recommendations for the NHS’s future workforce strategy, the British Medical Association has highlighted the benefits of a more flexible approach to working.

Having submitted seven recommendations to the draft national workforce strategy, the BMA has also emphasised the importance of placing a renewed focus on the recruitment and retention of staff, controlling workloads and better remuneration for doctors and staff in the NHS.

The BMA’s submission to the survey also states that improving doctors’ experience of training is crucial to recruiting staff, and that employers must be given sufficient funding to allow them to share in the responsibility for training, educating and retaining staff.

Anthea Mowat, BMA representative body chair, said: “The BMA has long called for a comprehensive, forward-looking workforce strategy to address issues relating to workforce monitoring and planning, resourcing sufficient education and training capacity and expanding skill mix to support the doctor-led medical model of care.

“Understaffed and under-resourced NHS services are currently having to manage unprecedented levels of patient demand. Chronic staff shortages and difficulties recruiting and retaining staff are major challenges across all health and care sectors … [and] these pressures also present a real risk to the quality of care and patient safety. We are very pleased that the moment has finally arrived where everyone with a stake in the NHS can contribute to and help deliver a national workforce strategy that can increase medical, clinical and non-clinical workforce supply and ensure it is sustainable long into the future.”