Health Services and Social Services: Vacancies
(asked on 30th April 2019) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent estimate he has made of the number of workforce vacancies in the health and social care sectors.
Posts may be vacant, for a variety of reasons including maternity and career breaks. Trusts make decisions based on local needs about how they fill these posts, including looking at short-term options for cover, including bank and agency staff.
Since April 2017, NHS Improvement collect vacancy rates of National Health Service staff from individual NHS trusts and publish them as part of their ‘Quarterly performance of the NHS provider sector’ report found at the following link:
As at 31 December there were 100,521 full time equivalent vacancies in NHS trusts, this is an 8.4% vacancy rate. Of these, approximately 80% and 85% of the nursing and medical vacancies are being filled by bank and agency staff.
Skills for Care estimate that there are approximately 110,000 jobs that are vacant in adult social care, this is an 8% vacancy rate.
The NHS People Plan sets out the next step in our mission to make the NHS a world class employer and deliver the workforce which the NHS needs.