The Humber, Coast and Vale Sustainability and Transformation Partnership – a collaboration of 28 health and care organisations working in Hull, York, North and East Yorkshire, North and North East Lincolnshire – has today published its first report into the area’s workforce challenges. The report provides details of the current health and social care workforce across the area known as Humber, Coast and Vale and identifies a number of challenges for delivering health and care services in this region.

These challenges include difficulties in finding and keeping the qualified workforce that we need to deliver good quality services across all of our organisations. Across our region there are shortages of registered entrants to health care careers, exacerbated by an ageing workforce (with 40-45% of all staff in our region aged over 50). Nurses in this age group in particular, are likely to be eligible to retire at 55, having membership of an earlier part of the NHS pension scheme. This mirrors the national picture of 5% of the NHS workforce being under 25, compared to a UK average of 12%.

The report sets out some of the first steps that the partnership is taking to address some of these challenges. This includes a programme to increase the number of apprenticeships within health and care organisations(from 149 in 2016/17 to a planned 644 placements in 2017/18) and to improve the opportunities for career progression for support staff entering into the sector. The second priority programme focuses on improving the skills of our existing workforce by introducing more opportunities for people to train as Advanced Clinical Practitioners and take up new roles within our health and care organisations.

Mike Proctor, Chair of Humber, Coast and Vale Local Workforce Action Board and Deputy Chief Executive of York Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust said: “Across health and social care organisations it is fair to say ‘our people are our greatest asset’. The frontline clinicians and support staff who provide health and care services day in day out are the backbone of our NHS.

The health and social care workforce is the primary driver of care delivery. It is also the primary driver of care cost and workforce problems of recruitment and retention are the root cause of many of the problems we face across health and care today; financial, safety, performance and quality.

The health and care workforce needs to be strengthened and transformed to deliver the NHS we need both now and in the future. We are proposing a number of exciting projects to shape a new generation of health and care professionals that will help us to deliver better health and care services in the future.”