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21 Oct 2026 I went looking for soft. I found scared. I have a theory, and I'm rather attached to it. I read the HR titles all the time (more out of habit than joy, if I'm honest), and every time I open one I seem to be wading through parental leave, menopause policies, bereavement support, baby loss awareness weeks and yet another survey about how stressed we all are. Meanwhile the economy is doing its best impression of a stalled car, AI is quietly hollowing out the entry-l

Is it just me, or is the job of keeping the nation well moving, a little at a time, from the health service to the workplace? Each new announcement on its own seems perfectly reasonable, and several are overdue. Taken together, though, they add up to something that deserves a name, and a conversation about who is expected to pay for it. A workplace health system, and a pattern The latest step came this week, when Sir Charlie Mayfield set out plans for what People Management d

The publication of the Health Foundation's NHS Productivity Commission's report, Breaking the Cycle: How to Build a More Productive NHS, on Tuesday 22nd September, deserves the attention it will undoubtedly receive across the sector this week. Anyone who works in or around the NHS should read it, not because it says anything especially new, but because it says the familiar things with unusual clarity, and clarity is precisely what a debate this cluttered with competing agenda

AI, governance and the healthcare workforce: why "next year's agenda" is not good enough I had a conversation recently with a director who told me, quite cheerfully, that AI was "on the agenda for next year." I have been thinking about it ever since, because this was the fortnight in which the timetable stopped being ours to set. Consider what landed in the space of a few days. A researcher resigned from a frontier AI laboratory, warning publicly that the industry is "gamblin

Probably not. It landed on 12 August, in the dead centre of the summer lull, in a dispute about a private hire driver and a weekly access charge, and it was covered, where it was covered at all, in the trade press rather than anywhere a chief executive might trip over it. There was no ministerial statement, no press conference on the steps of Parliament Square, no particular fanfare. And yet Augustine v Data Cars Limited [2026] UKSC 30 may prove to be one of the more conseque

What a National Care Service would actually require of the workforce built to deliver it The Centre for Workforce Intelligence and Planning | July 2026 A seventeen-year homecoming Andy Burnham has now been trying to fix social care for longer than some of the sector’s newest recruits have been alive. As Health Secretary in 2009, he published a Green Paper, Shaping the Future of Care Together, setting out three funding options for a new National Care Service and launching what

This discussion explored one of the defining issues facing the NHS over the coming decade: how to restore productivity while simultaneously transforming the way care is delivered. Although framed around productivity, the conversation repeatedly returned to workforce planning, arguing that the workforce challenge is not primarily about reducing staff numbers but about deploying people differently, supporting them better, and creating the conditions in which productivity can im

The Centre for Workforce Intelligence and Planning | June 2026 When Roy Lilley, one of the NHS's most widely read commentators, wrote this week about his experience as a day-case patient at Whipps Cross Hospital, he was not intending to write an academic paper on service design theory. But what he described — arriving for a procedure, not being on the printed list despite a confirmed booking, a nurse spending two hours navigating system failures just to get him registered, du

The NHS frames its 2026/27 dilemma as a tension between financial balance and service delivery. But the evidence points to a third dimension that keeps getting crowded out: the morale, motivation, and discretionary commitment of its workforce. Sacrifice that, and the ambitions of the 10 Year Health Plan become unreachable. There is a particular kind of institutional self-deception that public services fall into under financial pressure: the belief that difficult trade-offs ca

Long Read The NHS has spent decades trying to plan its workforce from above, with numbers set in stone and success measured in headcount. The incoming ten-year workforce strategy offers a chance to do something genuinely different. The question is whether we have the courage to take it. There is a particular kind of optimism that attaches itself to large workforce plans. Governments and health systems produce them with great ceremony, fill them with ambitious projections, and

Anyone who has been paying close attention to NHS policy over the past twelve months will not have been entirely surprised by the Financial Times's recent leak of the draft NHS workforce plan. Surprised by some of the language, perhaps — but not by the broad direction. The plan has been a long time coming. Wes Streeting originally committed to publishing a refreshed long-term workforce plan by the summer of 2025 (Nursing Times, 2024). That deadline came and went. By October 2

There is a moment in the Hans Christian Andersen story where everybody realises the same thing at exactly the same time. The Emperor is naked. The courtiers know it. The crowd knows it. The advisers know it. But nobody quite wants to be the first person to say it out loud because everybody else appears to be nodding along politely at the brilliance of the invisible fabric. Hans Christian Andersen's emperor was not deceived by malice. He was deceived by a collective unwilli

A Calmer Conversation About AI and the Future of Work There is a particular kind of exhaustion that sets in when every platform you visit, every feed you scroll, every newsletter that lands uninvited in your inbox, tells you that the world as you know it is about to end. Or, conversely, that it is about to become so glitteringly perfect that your grandchildren will wonder how we ever managed without it. Artificial intelligence is, depending on who you read today, either the s

Three years on from the pandemic, it is worth pausing to ask an uncomfortable question: have we actually made any progress? The honest answer is: not really. The cast of characters has changed, the policy language has shifted, and the most acute phase of the crisis has faded from the headlines. But the underlying dynamics — low pay, high turnover, fragile provider markets, and a workforce that the system quietly takes for granted — remain largely intact. That is not a smal

The NHS bank worker survey has been published, and if you blinked you might have missed it. There has been some coverage. The Health Service Journal focused on what it described as a growing “motivation gap” between bank and substantive staff. Other outlets picked up similar themes. Bank workers, it seems, are more enthusiastic, more likely to look forward to work, and report slightly higher engagement scores than their substantive colleagues. At a time when the main NHS Sta

Source: HSJ "Equal recruitment worst in a decade, according to NHSE data" There is a particular kind of discomfort that comes with data like this. The latest Workforce Race Equality Standard figures suggest that white applicants are now 1.77 times more likely to be appointed from an NHS shortlist than applicants from minority ethnic backgrounds, the widest gap in a decade. It is difficult to look at that statistic and not feel that something has gone backwards, particularly g

White paper dicussion of four themes of workforce change: total talent, skills over roles, flexible working and AI transformation.

There are moments in NHS policy where something important is said so quietly that it is almost missed. Not because it lacks significance, but because it is wrapped in the language of pragmatism, contingency, or operational necessity. Sir Jim Mackey’s recent comments about designing services “less reliant on resident doctors” feel like one of those moments. On the surface, this is a response to industrial action. A sensible, even inevitable reaction to a workforce that has