The doctor who is to lead a Scottish Labour study into NHS staffing says that the issue is undoubtedly one of the biggest challenges the health service is facing.
The party announced that Dr Miles Mack, chairman of the Royal College of General Practitioners, is to head its NHS and Social Care Workforce as Anas Sarwar, the Labour health spokesman, claimed that morale among workers in the NHS is at “rock bottom”.
Dr Mack said: “The workforce shortage within health and social care is undoubtedly one of the biggest challenges faced by the NHS as it responds to population changes across Scotland.
“This workforce commission is an opportunity to take a detailed look, with other independent stakeholders, at the situation as it is now and devise evidence-based recommendations for the future.”
The establishment of the commission comes with the Scottish government continuing to face pressure over vacancies within the NHS, with the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) warning last month that there are “too few nurses’’.
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The government later announced that an extra 2,600 training places for nurses and midwives will be created over the next four years.
Mr Sarwar said that a decade of the SNP in government in Edinburgh had resulted in “severe shortages”, as he claimed that NHS staff were “overworked, undervalued, under-resourced and underpaid”.
Labour stressed that Dr Mack is not a member of the party and said that he will remain politically neutral while the group carries out its work.
Other commission members include Theresa Fyffe, the RCN director; Kim Hartley Keen of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists; June Andrews, a professor of dementia studies; Dave Watson of Unison, the public services union; and John Marr from the GMB trade union’s Scottish Ambulance Service branch.
They will consider how best to determine the appropriate numbers of training places for health workers, and look into developing a strategy for attracting and retaining NHS staff. The experts will also consider how changes to Scotland’s population could impact on workforce requirements in the future.
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Mr Sarwar said: “A decade of SNP mismanagement has left our NHS staff overworked, undervalued, under-resourced and underpaid. We have severe shortages of NHS staff, including nurses, midwives, GPs and consultants. This is now starting to impact on services and patient care too, with a number of services under threat as we simply don’t have the staff to operate them.
“Staff morale is at rock bottom in the health service, with staff reporting there simply aren’t enough of them to do the job properly.”