From competition to collaboration on temporary staffing: How can ICSs best create shared staff banks?

The workforce challenge in the NHS is multi-faceted and enormously complicated, but it is clear that temporary and flexible staff will be key to addressing it. This makes effective management of staff banks particularly important, not least because it avoids unnecessary use of expensive agency options.

More and more of these banks are open collaborative – instead of competing with one another for temporary staff, multiple trusts across a geographic area unite to ensure best use of the flexible workforce. This increases the pool of staff available to any one organisation, but also increases options for workers.

The move to statutory integrated care systems offers new opportunities to adopt this sort of approach – indeed, NHS England has encouraged ICSs to progress this agenda. So how can ICSs best create a staff bank shared between its constituent organisations? What are the challenges? How can these be overcome? How can such a setup contribute to easing staffing pressures? And, from an employee perspective, what difference does greater access to flexible working make?

This HSJ webinar, run in association with Locum’s Nest, brought together a small panel of experts to consider the answers to these and related questions.