Recruiting struggles lead to underspend in mental health services across West Yorkshire

“Ongoing challenges” around recruitment is having an impact on West Yorkshire’s healthcare providers, with 14.1 per cent of positions across Kirklees’s mental health services currently vacant and funding going unspent when it comes to the mental health sector, a meeting heard.

At Kirklees Council’s Health and Adult Social Care Scrutiny Panel, a discussion surrounding the financial position of key healthcare organisations across West Yorkshire raised concerns about recruitment struggles and their implications.

Chair of the panel Coun Jackie Ramsay (Dewsbury South) questioned the underspending on South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust’s mental health services, and the overspending of Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust saying: “as a junior manager, I was always taught that underspending was as bad as overspending because I was impacting on quality.”

She went on to ask whether this meant that the budget for health services was balanced incorrectly, or if there was another reason for this.

In response, Darryl Thompson, chief nurse at SWYFT said: “We share your concern about underspending. We would clearly be wanting to spend that money on staff and our estates projects. The proportion of our finances as a large new mental health provider is always more towards staffing than our acute providers, but the challenge for us is around recruitment. We are trying many different incentives to recruitment, different advertising campaigns, and also international recruitment, but that would be the main rationale behind our underspend.”

Suzanne Dunkley, executive director of workforce and organisational development at Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Trust, highlighted that the panel was already aware of the CHFT’s overspending and that this wasn’t a new development in this financial year.

She added: “What’s driving a lot of that is our inability to come out of Covid-19 costs.

"The number of Covid-19 positive patients in our trust went from around two, right back up to nearly 100 in the space of a couple of weeks so we were unable to exit that cost, and like my colleague from SWYFT, we sometimes have to put in temporary measures in order to fill vacancy gaps which are national vacancies which all trusts struggle to recruit to, particularly in our emergency departments, but also in some of our technical specialities such as neurology.”

Such temporary measures include using agency staff which can be costly, and the use of workers belonging to NHS staff banks.

However, efforts are being made to up the number of health and social care recruits with the implementation of the Calderdale and Kirklees Health Care Programme which seeks to encourage young people to work in the sector, and an overseas recruitment scheme that primarily employs nurses, though this is set to expand.

Stacey Appleyard, director of Healthwatch Kirklees, reported: “We are still hearing from quite a lot of people about staff and workforce, but not in terms of pressures.

"It’s around the quality of care that they’re receiving and actually, they’re still reporting that people are feeling positive about the support they’re receiving.”

She went on to say that patients have reported that the quality of care and staff attitudes have been “excellent.”