Hospital Pharmacist
2007;14:5
January 2007

News summary

DoH plan predicts excess NHS jobs

By 2010 there will be more health professionals than the NHS can afford to employ. This is according to a draft of the NHS pay and workforce strategy for 2008-11 that was reported in the Health Service Journal earlier this month. The document predicts that by 2010/11 there will be excess of 16,200 allied health professionals, health care scientists and technicians. However, it is unclear how many, if any, of these are pharmacists.

Anthony Oxley, president of the Guild of Healthcare Pharmacists, commented: “The Royal Pharmaceutical Society's analysis has shown that there is likely to be a shortage of pharmacists in the future rather than a surplus. We cannot draw any conclusions from the broad approach used in the Department of Health draft document, where pharmacists are grouped together with so many other professions, but would need to see more detail of the breakdown of these figures.”

David Miller, chairman of the guild’s terms and conditions committee, added: “Workforce predictions are notoriously inaccurate and DoH data normally only deal with numbers in the managed sector rather than the commercial sector where most of the profession practise. The increasing numbers of pharmacists employed by the managed sector over the past 10 years shows members’ versatility and the value they add to the safe effective and economic management of medicines. This will continue over the next five years.”