Make the most of the AHP workforce

Like most of my chief nurse colleagues, the professional leadership of allied health professionals (AHPs) is in my portfolio, and although I appreciate that a number of my colleagues have developed their future workforce strategies with AHPs fully included in their delivery plans, I would suggest that the majority of us have not. This is not surprising with nursing domination of the agenda with current nursing vacancies reported nationally as around 40 000, the constant day-to-day pressure on safe staffing requirements, and the Interim NHS People Plan deliberately starting with nursing (NHS England, 2019; NHS Improvement, 2019a). This aims to:

Through the nursing recruitment and retention workstreams that I have been involved in, it is increasingly evident that the actions that we are taking in nursing are wholly appropriate to apply to our AHP teams. I feel that we are missing a trick and need an integrated approach to expand our ‘non-medical workforce’ (as an aside, I dislike this term, we should not describe a group as ‘not something’). Fortunately, the national teams have been working on this potential for some time.