This is well-publicised and was the first issue everyone raised. The NHS has a ”massive shortage” of staff and there is no getting away from this.

“There are a lot more of them [patients] than us”, is how one nurse summed it up.

It’s easy to think the current “staffing crisis” only leads to a ‘backlog’ of work, but its impact is far wider reaching than that. The lack of staff has a major impact throughout the system.

If patients aren’t being seen, they can’t be optimised. This lack of optimisation means “there are more complications down the line” and, as one consultant concluded, “these problems then lead to further problems”.

What can you do?

Many factors have contributed to this staffing crisis, and it’s certainly not the responsibility of the Pharma industry to fix them.

That said, if NHS services are depleted this has an impact on the companies which focus on those services, and they are likely to have a vested interest in helping to find solutions.

One specialist nurse practitioner questioned why she didn’t see posts being sponsored by Pharma as much as she used to. Co-sponsoring a new post for a period of time can be an effective way of helping to gather the data needed to support the case for a full-time position.

Providing business case support to recruit a new member of staff is something Pharma is well equipped to do, along with having a wealth of real world data to enhance the argument.

Even advice on recruitment, admittedly not a core offering for Pharma, is an interesting value add to the NHS who are having to deploy more creative ways to get new people on board. In our experience the NHS always values advice from the private sector on common problems.

Please get in touch to understand how Opus can support your business to engage with the NHS in 2023. We have the expertise, experience and creativity to find that unknown insight and translate it into a deliverable idea.

These insights are compiled from interviews conducted in December 2022 with a range of NHS healthcare professionals working in secondary and tertiary care (including nurses, consultants and pharmacists).

They will hopefully help to inform how people working in Pharma can engage with the NHS in 2023.