NHS staff shortages forced a Peckham GP surgery to pay an “inordinate amount of money” to a recruitment agency because it couldn’t get the staff it needed.
Becky Stephens, a doctor at The Gardens Surgery off Peckham Rye Park, and clinical director of Improving Health London, a federation of general practices, said staffing was “very difficult”.
The revelation comes amid an NHS staffing crisis described by Parliament’s Health and Social Care Committee as “the greatest in its history”.
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Speaking at the multi-ward panel meeting in Dulwich Village on Tuesday, September 20, she said: “Unrealistically, there’s quite a lot of people I’d like to clone and I think recruitment is a big problem.
“If we could recruit all the people that we wanted to recruit that would make a massive difference.
“In my practice, we’ve just paid an inordinate amount of money to a recruitment agency for the first time ever because we couldn’t recruit through any of the usual channels. I think staffing – that’s very difficult.”
In July, a Health and Social Care Committee report said “almost every healthcare profession is facing shortages”.
Their research suggested that the NHS in England is short of 12,000 hospital doctors and more than 50,000 nurses and midwives.
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The committee predicted that 475,000 more workers in health and 490,000 more social care workers were needed “by the early part of the next decade” to avoid collapse.
Earlier this month, public service union UNISON said that improving staff pay and conditions would be key to retaining staff.
UNISON Head of Health Sara Gorton said: “Staffing shortages are getting worse by the day. That means constant struggles to fill rotas and move people to where they’re most needed.
“The government needs a long-term answer to workforce pressures. Ignoring targets that show the public how safe and effective their NHS services are won’t fix the underlying funding gap. Nor will removing the people needed to manage the never-ending juggling act.
“Any solution to the workforce crisis has to begin with an urgent commitment to increasing NHS pay and protecting staff against rising household costs That’s the way to ensure they stay working where they’re most needed.”
The parliamentary committee review said: “A radical review of working conditions is needed to reduce the intensity of work felt by many frontline professionals and boost retention.”
A spokesperson for NHS South East London said: “As in other areas of the country and capital, NHS South East London is undertaking work to improve recruitment and retention across the ICS, including in primary care.
“Alongside GP recruitment and retention schemes, there is significant work underway to support primary care to introduce new clinical and professional roles into their teams – such as physiotherapists and mental health practitioners – to provide expert care to patients as part of a multi-disciplinary team.
“Using a specialist recruiter to support individual practices with their recruitment needs for a wide range of specialist roles can help to ensure a more effective and efficient recruitment process for the practice.”