Quality, Safety and Workforce

We asked a series of questions which looked to understand what our members see as the key opportunities and threats in regards to quality and safety in their organisations, along with how they’re trying to address these challenges.

Advances and Implementation of clincially focussed AI and digital tools is cited as the biggest opportunity around quality and safety by members this year, despite not featuring in last year’s results. Likewise workforce recruitment, cited by 46% of members as an opportuntiy, also wasn’t in the top three last year, meaning the two most common responses are entirely new for this year.

“Digital and AI gives so many more opportunities… really interesting things that will help us to enable that faster delivery of healthcare.”

Overwhelmingly, respondents see surrent reviews of the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and the regulation landscape more generally as the biggest challenge, at 78%, a small increase of 12% from last year.

“The data and digital side of things as well as the actual inspection regimes… it’s having a very real impact for us as a multi-site provider.”

In the last year there has been a large drop in the proportion of members who will look to tackle workforce challenges through “growing their own” with e.g. apprenticeships, widening participation or training and development, from 83% to 49%. There has been a corresponding increase in the proportion of members looking to “Create new innovative roles or changing skillsets”, from 39% last year to 49% this year.

With an increase in independent healthcare providers looking to upskill and adapt the existing workforce, there’s clear aspirations from the sector to increase clinical training, with 46% of respondents expecting this to increase in the next five years, and only 17% thinking that training levels will decrease.

Likewise, clinical apprenticeships still remain a core priority for independent healthcare providers, with half of respondents saying they will maintain existing programmes or increase these in the next 12 months. The responses for apprenticeships match the responses for training overall.