Abstract

There is confidence that some of the best health educators and researchers in the world are to be found in the United Kingdom. However, it is clear from our work that this workforce is currently facing a crisis caused by under-recruitment, disparities in pay and reward, and rigid or poorly articulated career opportunities, all of which militate against flexible careers that might embrace practice, education and research.

It is clear that there are particular barriers to the recruitment of service staff from the NHS or Social Care into the educator/researcher workforce. In some professions there may be differences in the basic salaries between service and academia, particularly at senior/advanced and consultant practitioner grades. In other fields there may be parity in basic salary between service and academia but substantial differences in terms and conditions of employment.

To neglect this important workforce will degrade future plans for education and research in health and social care and place future learner/student education at risk; however, the nature, extent and capacity of the health and social care educator and researcher workforce are not well understood. An estimate of activity suggests that as many as 300,000 people in the health and social care professions are directly involved in educational and research-related work on a day-to-day basis.

It is important to sustain and develop the careers of those already in post (through an appropriate human resources plan), while at the same time anticipating the needs of those wishing to embark on a career as educators and researchers for the first time. However, one of the challenges in preparing such an HR plan is that not all of them would consider themselves to be part of the teaching and research workforce.

It is the purpose of the current project and its associated report to articulate the principal staffing problems faced in health and social care related teaching and research, to identify possible solutions and strategies, and to make a number of recommendations for consideration at the national, regional and institutional levels. Taken together, it is argued that this range of proposed initiatives has the potential to overcome many of the identified challenges and barriers.

This report has been prepared as a prelude to, and in anticipation of, the development of an integrated, high-level cross-sectoral HR plan. Accordingly, the attributes of such a plan are detailed in Appendix A hereto.