The Health Foundation's reponse to Liberating the NHS: Developing the Healthcare Workforce

Date: March 2011

Download: The Health Foundation's reponse to Liberating the NHS: Developing the Healthcare Workforce

Background

The Department of Health’s consultation, 'Liberating the NHS: Developing the Healthcare Workforce' sets out proposals to establish a new framework for developing the healthcare workforce and seeks views on the systems and processes that will be needed to support it.

The Health Foundation's response

As the NHS enters one of the most financially constrained periods in its history, securing a workforce with the appropriate knowledge, experience and skills, and deploying them efficiently and effectively, is a highly complex challenge.

The vision set out in 'Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS', puts clinicians at the centre of decisions about the allocation of increasingly scarce resources. To realise this vision requires a significant change in the roles and responsibilities of all health professionals.

The Health Foundation believes that the medical workforce in particular will need to rise to this challenge if the aims of the health reforms are to be achieved. We believe that a strong emphasis on education and training will play an important part in improving the capacity and capability of doctors to make the transition from how they currently see their role to how they will need to see it in the future. This is why the Health Foundation is promoting the need for a new model of professionalism.