Written Answers from the Department of Health and Social Care – Number of additional non-medical staff hired since 2019

This question reveals a large build up in staff over the last three years. I will ask for more detail of who they are and what they are doing:

 

The Department of Health and Social Care has provided the following answer to your written parliamentary question (123838):

Question:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many additional non-medical staff have been recruited to the NHS since the end of 2019. (123838)

Tabled on: 16 January 2023

Answer:
Will Quince:

The following table shows the increase in number of full-time equivalent non-medical staff, by staff group, working in National Health Service trusts and commissioning bodies from the end of 2019 to the latest month that the data is available.

Staff group December 2019 October 2022 Change
Non-medical professionally qualified clinical staff 479,815 527,280 47,465 (9.9%)
Support to clinical staff 341,992 385,084 43,092 (12.6%)
NHS infrastructure support staff 180,540 205,321 24,781 (13.7%)
Total non-medical staff 1,002,347 1,117,685 115,338 (11.5%)

The answer was submitted on 23 Jan 2023 at 17:57.

12 Comments

  1. DOM
    January 25, 2023

    All unionised –
    All politicised
    All lefty leaning
    All Labour voters

    Public sector scam and the Tories refuse to expose it, they simply accept it and pass on the cost to the public

    Tory party politics is now one of ‘party survival first and bollocks to everything else’

    We need Badenoch or someone like her and we get a sneaky Blairite grifter

    1. Bloke
      January 25, 2023

      Most might be Labour supporters, but claiming to know the voting intention of over 1 million employees is beyond belief.

  2. BOF
    January 25, 2023

    Question. Has the NHS increased in capacity by these percentages and treating that many more patients? If not, why the increase in management and non medical staff numbers?

    Proof, if any were needed, that a far greater role is needed for private sector health. People are already being forced to seek private health care. I have had to have a hip replacement and eye surgery since 2020 privately simply because I could not wait for the NHS.

  3. Jude
    January 25, 2023

    John, these additional personnel plus the other 3 roles you mention, with huge increases in numbers. Will be all the additional people employed for Covid support. Thousands of extra personnel to deliver millions of jabs. The questions being:how many were volunteers, how much did these posts cost the trusts . Then how many are still in post, doing what?
    The other issue being that during Covid all other care was hslted. Yet medical staff still went to work even when they had no patients on the wards etc. Why were these staff not redeployed?? It’s mismanagement on a massive scale!

  4. Sir Joe Soap
    January 25, 2023

    Over 1 million non-medical staff to service a 60 million population means around 40 minutes service of a non-medical employee PER WEEK to EVERYONE in the country. Am I typical in having spoken to non-medical NHS staff for perhaps 3 minutes in the past year? What on earth are these people doing?

  5. Berkshire Alan
    January 25, 2023

    Well I guess it gives us a clue where all the extra money has gone, problem is it has not solved the worst part of the NHS, which is dire administration.
    When are the Government going to hold those who actually run, and are responsible for the NHS on a day -day basis, to account ?

  6. Ian B
    January 25, 2023

    1,117,685? but how many with a functioning job that provides a service to their Customers?
    The Kings Fund quotes for 2019 – 1.4 million hospital admissions over the whole year. Logic roughly 1 administrator to each patient. Administrators paid for 365 days patients come and go.

  7. AncientPopeye
    January 25, 2023

    This looks like, to my unwoke eye, about a million penpushers?
    I just wonder how many of them are ‘friends’, ‘family’ etc of the Trusts top brass?

  8. Mickey Taking
    January 25, 2023

    So over the last 3 years those 4 divisions of staff employing over 1 million people, has risen to over 1.1 million, varying between 10% and 13% larger staff numbers.
    Yet we are told staff are leaving in droves, they are badly paid, have no increases in pay, it cannot recruit replacements.
    A breathtakingly dreadful response which brings deceit and lies into national focus.

  9. Rhoddas
    January 25, 2023

    Rampant and splintered administration, every Trust does the same things, but of course somewhat DIFFERENTLY! They will claim they have valid reasons, but in reality it’s nonsense…. just legacy stuff.
    How to obtain streamlined / more automated procedures… where to start?

    The answer conceptually is ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE, which in IT parlance is the capturing everything each hospital does, procedure-wise and ensures data is correctly held/owned/updated and all procedures are simplified to one way of working and hugely automated. Google EA.

    With over a million people and several hundred trusts it will be like eating an elephant…. but the NHS have got to start somewhere…. Boris talked about ~40 new hospitals – they should all work to a new NHS Digital Blueprint, same IT and same WOW way of working. Then transform all the remaining hospitals.

    Bring England/Wales/NI and Scotland into the one way of working too. Make funding based on “One Way” operation, otherwise reduce funding… to pay for the transformation costs.

  10. Pauline Baxter
    January 25, 2023

    Yes well, says it all really doesn’t it. Every one of these non medical, pen pushing staff, will be earning more than the nurses, or even the ambulance drivers, probably.
    So what is your wonderful Party, Leader, P.M, going to do to put it right before the next G.E.?
    As well as all the other problems facing the country. Which, undoubtedly the other ‘Big’ Parties would make an even worse hash of dealing with.
    This country does not need so much bureaucratic pen pushing anywhere.
    What we need is to produce goods to sell in the ‘global marketplace’. As you well know, Sir John.
    What are we producing? What do we have to offer that marketplace? Anything?

  11. Geoffrey Berg
    January 25, 2023

    As there are about 100,000 in-patients in hospitals, so there are about eleven times as many non-medical full-time equivalent staff ‘working’ in the NHS as hospital in-patients (a tiny bit less if one allows for out-patients).
    Yes, the NHS needs sorting (operational privatisation akin to private prisons, I say) but good luck with that because most people and most politicians (apart from John Redwood whom I commend for his continuing efforts to bring some rationality into the NHS) are irrational, innumerate and just emote about the NHS and much else besides (such as health and safety regulations).

Comments are closed.