Sharp drop in staff vacancies at Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trust in the last 12 months

The current vacancy rate is 6.3 per cent - compared to almost 10 per cent this time last year.

The vacancy rates for nursing roles has dropped from almost 12 per cent to under 8 per cent - a figure boosted by the recruitment of over 200 new nurses.

And the rate for Healthcare Support Workers has seen a ‘huge’ drop from over 17 per cent to under 6 per cent.

The Trust rates have been falling since the start of the year - new figures from NHS England show 8.1% of full-time equivalent positions at PHU were unfilled as of the end of December.

At the end of March 2022, this figure was 9.1%.

Chief People Officer Nicole Cornelius, from PHU, said: ‘Improving our vacancy rate through recruitment and retention is an important priority to the Trust.

‘This ensures we have appropriate staffing levels for patient safety and quality of care, and retain our highly skilled and dedicated staff, who have faced exceptionally challenging pressures over the last three years.

‘Through the hard work and dedication of our workforce teams, our current vacancy rate for all roles at PHU is 6.3 per cent, an improvement to this time last year when it was 9.9 per cent.

‘Vacancies are covered through the use of bank staff to ensure patient safety and quality of care.

‘In this last year (2022-2023) we have recruited newly qualified nurses from local universities and, in addition to our national recruitment, we have had 230 internationally educated nurses join the Trust.

‘We will be recruiting a further 220 internationally educated nurses this year.

‘This has contributed to a drop in nursing vacancies from 11.9 per cent last year to 7.7 per cent.

‘We have also focused our efforts on recruiting and retaining our Healthcare Support Workers, who provide a crucial supporting role to our nurses and doctors.

‘Thanks to this effort we have seen a huge drop in our vacancy rate from 17.5 per cent last year to 5.9 per cent.

‘We recognise recruitment is an issue across the whole of the NHS and our teams and departments have been working on recruitment and retention initiatives including open days, offering staff strong health and wellbeing benefits, and designing additional learning and development opportunities.’

Across NHS trusts in the South East - which includes Portsmouth - 5,994 (10.9%) nursing positions and 1,075 (5.1%) doctors' roles were unfilled at the end of December 2022.

For all NHS trust staff in the region, 8.9% of positions were unfilled – up from 8.8% a year before.

Caroline Waterfield, director of development and employment at NHS Employers – part of the NHS confederation – said: ‘We know that the NHS is not immune to the challenges facing the rest of the UK economy in terms of a very competitive labour market.

‘Not only has it been very tricky to attract the right number of suitable candidates into some roles, we’ve also seen higher levels of turnover as colleagues move jobs within the health and social care sector and into other industries.

‘In some clinical roles, such as nursing and doctors, recruiting from overseas has supplemented UK training and enabled vacancies to be filled.’

Ms Waterfield urged Government to implement the ‘overdue’ long-term workforce plan for the NHS immediately.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: ‘There are record numbers of staff working in the NHS, with over 51,500 more people compared to a year ago – including over 5,300 more doctors and over 12,300 more nurses.

‘We want to build on this progress and will publish a workforce plan shortly to ensure that we have the right numbers of staff, with the right skills to transform and deliver high quality services fit for the future.’