Our State of the Nation report for the anaesthetic workforce – a gloomy picture but there’s hope!

Published: 24/02/2022
Dr Fiona Donald

Dr Fiona Donald, RCoA President

On 23 February 2022 we launched The Anaesthetic Workforce: UK State of the Nation Report as part of Anaesthesia – fit for the future, our UK-wide influencing campaign through which we’ll set out a vision for ‘team anaesthesia’ and define the support it needs to deliver the best possible patient care beyond COVID-19. The aim of this report is to paint a comprehensive picture of the anaesthetic workforce today and what it will need in the future to meet the increasing demands of a growing and ageing population.

At the time of writing this blog we appear to be over the latest wave of COVID-19 patients brought to us by the Omicron variant. As seen in previous waves the NHS was hit hard by this variant, with record numbers of staff absences and the inevitable delays in the provision of non-urgent care, adding further to the backlog of patients awaiting elective treatment. The scale of the challenge is now huge. In England an all-time record of six million people are currently waiting for treatment, while Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have each reported over 600,000 people waiting for referrals, treatment or diagnostics.

Health and social care in the UK are now stretched to the very limit and there are unavoidable constraints on what it is possible to deliver with the available resources and investment, already a limiting factor pre-pandemic. COVID-19 has exacerbated the challenge further and has had a particularly detrimental effect on the physical and mental wellbeing of frontline staff, including anaesthetists. Our state of the nation report shows that about one in  four anaesthetists plans to leave the NHS within five years and around one third said that COVID-19 made them less inclined to stay working in the NHS. We must do everything we can to retain our most precious resource, our people, and to offer the flexibilities required to keep them in work. However, while these initiatives will offer some relief, they will not fix the problem at its core – chronic excessive workloads caused by workforce shortages.

Our latest census has shown that the UK healthcare service is currently 1,400 consultant and SAS anaesthetists short and that the anaesthetic workforce is not growing fast enough to meet the increase in demand for anaesthetic services, made worse by the fact that 39 per cent of anaesthetists are now in the 50 plus age group. Modelling commissioned to York Health Economics Consortium for this report tells us that at its current growth rate the anaesthetic workforce gap in the UK is set to grow dramatically to around 11,000 FTEs by the year 2040.

Anaesthesia is not alone in facing an uncertain future when it comes to demand and supply and what we need now is a game changer – something that will reassure our demoralised workforce, across all specialties and professions, that there is light at the end of the tunnel, and which shows real commitment from Government to address the workforce gaps. I’m talking about a long-term workforce strategy, backed up by projections for the health and social care workforce, just like those we have provided in our report.

Such strategies have been promised many times in the past, but have failed to materialise so far, but let me end this blog on a positive note. Over the past two years we have witnessed a sea change in the narrative around health and social care workforce shortages and there is now growing support at many levels for Governments across the UK to do better at workforce planning and for training the right number of people needed long term. The RCoA is one of 70 organisations campaigning for an amendment on workforce planning in the Health and Care Bill which would require the Secretary of State to publish regular assessments of current and future workforce needs.

This pressure has finally resulted in the Secretary of State for Health and Care announcing a new commission to NHS England to create a long-term workforce strategy, to add much needed ‘numbers’ to the HEE review of its strategic framework on workforce planning and the People Plan.

Our state of the nation report and its projections puts us in a strong position to engage meaningfully with all agencies involved in this new commission and to advocate on behalf of our members across the UK for greater investment in the anaesthetic workforce.  

Dr Fiona Donald

RCoA President