NHS Long term workforce plan

What Next?

NHS England intends to publish further iterations of the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan at least every two years, to reflect the progress that has been made in delivering the actions set out here, and to take account of changes to the way services and care may be delivered in future. 

The plan builds on asks made of systems in previous national guidance. This includes the 10 functions set out in the ICS People Function guidance (2021) and the NHS Operational Planning Guidance 2023/’24, which included an overarching objective to “Improve retention and staff attendance through a systematic focus on all elements of the NHS People Promise “ and asks systems to produce whole system workforce plans and numerical workforce plans.

Crucially, ICBs and their partner organisations will set out the steps to provide the workforce and services required to meet the physical and mental health needs of their population over the next five years in their Joint Forward Plans (JFP).

Joint Forward Plan guidance asks ICBs to set out how they intend to discharge their duties in relation to education and training, arising from the Health and Care Act 2022, and highlights the opportunity to articulate how education and training plans relate to the wider actions in their workforce plans to deliver the recovery, reform, and resilience of services in the short (1-2 years), medium (3-5 years) and long-term. The guidance also recommends that ICBs use their JFPs to demonstrate how they will address broader workforce issues for their systems, such as:

• Developing an evidence-based, system-wide approach to workforce planning, that is closely aligned to finance and activity planning.
• Developing a system-wide approach to recruitment, retention, and deployment, informed by joined-up workforce planning.
• Bringing teams together to help enable the integration of services, e.g. through co-location or creating collaborative multi-professional teams.  

LTWP builds on ongoing and planned work, and we will seek to include relevant actions from the plan in the NHS operational planning guidance 2024/’25. 

We will co-design the approach to delivery of system-level LTWP actions with system colleagues, who will be best-placed to determine where variation in approaches will be needed for particular actions, informed by local needs and opportunities.

Following publication, NHS England’s national and regional teams and partners will offer direction and support where this will help to ensure successful delivery of actions.