NHS ‘ready to step up’ staffing if future Covid wave hits, MSPs told

The NHS is “ready to step up” when it comes to vaccination and contact tracing staff should there be a new coronavirus wave, MSPs have heard.

Holyrood’s Covid-19 Recovery Committee took evidence on the pandemic’s strategic framework from an expert panel on Thursday.

It comes after it emerged this week that vacancies for nurses and midwives in NHS Scotland have increased by 24%.

Scottish Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser asked if it would be possible, given this issue, to carry out the same level of recruitment to manage staffing requirements should there be a new wave of the virus.

Mr Fraser said: “Should we, perish the thought, have a new wave of Covid or a new variant of Covid as we go into the winter, how practical and realistic would it be for you to staff up again to numbers we’ve seen previously?”

Mary Morgan, chief executive of NHS National Services Scotland (NSS), said training has been maintained for staff in the contact centre.

She added this training is not only for handling calls in regard to vaccination, but also to maintain capability for contact tracing.

Ms Morgan said: “We’ve got a number of flexes there, so not only are we retaining the employed staff, the 260 whole-time equivalents who are directly employed through the NSS, but we’re also maintaining bank capability for those people who perhaps don’t want to regularly work with us.

“We also do retain contracts with third party suppliers in order to be able to give us that flex.”

She called the recruitment process during the pandemic a “monumental effort”.

She told MSPs: “We were able to do that really, really quickly, and really, really nimbly.

“In the event that we would see another wave and another preparedness needing to go through, we have learning from that that we could apply.

“It’s not in our plans to have another start-out at the end of Covid. We’re much more prepared than we were, and we obviously have capability that’s been built into play.

“We also have all of the scripts that are available, all of those kinds of things, ready to step up.”

However, the committee was warned there is a need for reform in the country’s health service.

Richard Robinson, senior manager at Audit Scotland, said: “There were financial sustainability issues with the NHS position before we went into Covid-19, and those haven’t gone away.”

Scottish Labour’s Alex Rowley asked whether the budget for NHS Scotland is “adequate to actually fund” a recovery.

Carolyn Low, director of finance at NSS, said the funding given to the health sector to respond to the pandemic was “in practice, unlimited”.

She added: “It felt as if we were resourced properly to do what we had to do, and the response that we were able to do on behalf of the country was phenomenal.

“But the reality is that that spending resource has stopped, and we need to now get back to a position that’s more sustainable, and we’ve got wider pressures around inflation that we need to deal with.”

There are “real choices that need to be made” around prioritisation in spending as a result, Ms Low added.