NHS England has published a letter to NHS trusts and ICBs, outlining available funding which can be applied for to improve staff retention, in line with the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan (LTWP).
The LTWP outlined the need to improve staff retention by making the NHS “a better place to work”, and has already reported a fall in staff leaver rate from 9.4 percent in August of 2022, to 8.1 percent in August of 2023.
NHS England highlights that the leaver rate has improved faster than the average across 23 NHS trusts who are participating in the People Promise Exemplar programme, which delivers “a suite of interventions reflecting the People Promise and based on the needs of local staff groups”.
Now, to help sustain and build on these improvements, NHS England has announced that it will be making funding available to support the coordination, embedding and management of the People Promise interventions. Participating organisations will receive benefits including a “systematic and structured quality improvement-based approach”, access to peer learning, and support from dedicated regional retention teams.
Organisations hoping to be a part of the programme should consider “their chief executive’s demonstrable personal commitment”, as well as the stability of their executive team, their workforce culture, and “appetite for and recognition of the need to improve staff experience and retention”.
These considerations should be included within an expression of interest, which will need to be submitted to NHS England regional directors by 5pm on Monday the 4 December 2023.
To read the letter in full, please click here.
In other workforce news, NHS England recently wrote to ICBs and trusts to ask that they complete a “rapid two-week exercise” to address the financial challenges created by industrial action, and agree actions required to deliver priorities for the rest of the financial year.
