Director of strategy and workforce planning at the education and training organisation Health Education England Jo Lenaghan has used an interview with the Health Service Journal to unveil the organisation’s new long term plan. The organisation plans to reallocate its budget to create jobs with less rigid specialisms while investing more in non-medical roles and re-skilling the existing workforce.
The interview is part of the presentation of HEE’s 15-year strategy, with Ms Lenaghan adding that the duration of training required for senior medical professionals, which can sometimes be over ten years, means that staffing and training decisions made now have a long term effect. She went on to highlight the importance of a more flexible workforce for the NHS, contrasting it to rigid specialism and mentioned women’s surgeons, physician associates, prescribing pharmacists and orthopaedic physicians as examples under consideration by the organisation, while praising intensive care specialists in the acute sector as a good example of a generalist model that worked well.
