NHS staff resigning in record numbers

Burned-out workers are leaving the United Kingdom's state-owned National Health Service in record numbers after two years of long hours and frontline stress in the fight against the novel coronavirus.

Research conducted for the charity Engage Britain by John Hall, a former strategy director of the government's Department of Health and Social Care, found more than 400 workers are currently leaving each week. In 2019, the total was 200.

"Around 50 in every 10,000 staff working in hospital and community health services in June 2021 left the service within the next three months, citing work-life balance as the reason," Hall wrote in his report. "This was a new record."

Julian McCrae, Engage Britain's director, told The Guardian newspaper: "NHS workers across the country have spoken to us about feeling overstretched, undervalued, and struggling to get support in a chaotic system."

The charity wants urgent reform of the way the NHS is organized and run.

The NHS - which delivers medical and mental health services to people in the UK for free at the point of delivery, through hospitals, doctor's surgeries, dental practices, and a range of other community services and clinics - has around 1.5 million workers and is easily the UK's largest employer.

Hall's report said the British public is becoming concerned about whether the exodus will dent the quality of care on offer. And he said more than a quarter of adults questioned said they or an immediate family member received poor care because of worker shortages.

"The workforce crisis in the NHS has clearly penetrated the public consciousness," Hall wrote. "The UK has long had significantly lower numbers of doctors and nurses per capita than comparable systems … More recently, the impact of working conditions is showing an increasing impact on the ability of the NHS to retain staff. "

In addition to the large number of people leaving the NHS, around one-third of those working in the largely private-sector social care system have also left their jobs in the past year.

Jeremy Hunt, chairman of the House of Commons health select committee and a former UK health secretary, warned the government in Parliament recently that the UK is headed for an NHS and social care workforce crisis.

He told MPs: "The (pandemic) is exacerbating the problem but we already had a serious staffing crisis, with a burnt-out workforce, 93,000 vacancies, and no sign of any plan to address this."

Research conducted by the Health Foundation think tank in 2019 showed the number of personnel leaving the NHS because of a poor work-life balance had almost trebled in the preceding seven years.

It found 3,689 NHS employees cited burnout as the reason they left in 2010, while 10,257 cited burnout in 2018.