By Alejandro Coca, co-head at TrueProfile.io
Closing the NHS skills gap by streamlining and speeding up the recruitment process across the global healthcare industry is now, more than ever before in modern peacetime, a crucially important challenge.
Widely-reported staff shortages across Britain’s healthcare sector were already cause for concern long before the recent coronavirus crisis presented the NHS with an immediate and urgent need for better, faster and more secure solutions to this intractable problem.
Recent reports forecast that staff shortfalls in the NHS were expected to grow from over 100,000 in 2018 to almost 250,000 by 2030.[1]
The COVID-19 pandemic only serves to bring the most pressing issue in today’s health and care sectors into frighteningly sharp focus. That’s because the massive workforce challenges facing our NHS now pose a far more real and imminent threat to a much greater proportion of Britain’s current population than they did only a matter of weeks ago.
Formerly-functioning healthcare systems overwhelmed
Healthcare workforce shortages are likely to become particularly severe as the number of COVID-19 cases continue to multiply. Which means that our own NHS and many other formerly-functioning healthcare systems are very quickly becoming overwhelmed and understaffed as the coronavirus epidemic moves to its peak.
Not only do these staff shortages impact upon the quality of treatment and care on offer, they lengthen waiting times and only serve to increase the already-high levels of uncertainty in everyone’s lives. The reality is that the NHS’s increasingly visible lack of doctors, nurses and other key frontline staff is only set to worsen over the next decade, putting both access to treatments and quality of care at even more severe risks, unless urgent steps can be taken to close the skills gap.
However, there is one glaring disconnect here. The NHS can and should be doing everything within its power to speedily recruit the best healthcare professionals from around the globe to address staff and skills shortages, yet the system is too often hampered by outdated and overly-bureaucratic processes in which, for example, professional documents and qualification checks take far longer and cost far more than is necessary.
Clearly, verifying that candidates are who they say they are and that they do possess the skills, experience and credentials which they claim to do is a fundamentally important part of healthcare recruitment. But why should it take as long as it does, causing too many unnecessary skills gaps and staffing bottlenecks?
Streamlining recruitment for a post-Brexit world
In our post-Brexit world – and looking longer-term, beyond today’s urgent and immediate needs that are already stretching the system to its limits – the NHS has to streamline, speed up and modernise its recruitment process.
Almost anybody involved in modern healthcare in Britain can see that there is a critical need for the NHS to recruit more international healthcare professionals.
Yet with Brexit already well under way, NHS recruiters, HR managers and healthcare regulators face a puzzling dilemma: how to employ the best medical and care talent from around the world, while maintaining consistent, thorough authenticity checks on candidates’ professional and academic credentials?
Traditionally, verifying private documents such as passports or professional credentials such as degree certificates has been a lengthy, complex and costly process, particularly if when it comes to overseas applicants and recruiters do not have the required local knowledge and contacts. When adding language barriers to the mix, it is easy to see why many British hospitals and healthcare facilities struggle in their hunt for high quality overseas medical talent.
New and innovative technologies to support the NHS
Fortunately, there are a range of innovative technologies available that can offer recruiters and regulators with the tools they need to streamline the recruitment process. For example, using blockchain-enabled professional document verification platforms, candidates will have the ability to securely upload and verify private documents, such as passports or university certificates.
Which sounds really great. Though what does it actually mean, in practice?
It means that NHS recruiters and regulators across the UK are now able to efficiently and safely vet healthcare professionals from across the world faster and more securely than ever before. Previously, where it might have taken an organisation anything up to six months to verify an overseas candidate’s credentials, the latest blockchain-enabled online platforms remove those obstacles in one fell swoop.
In addition, a range of other platforms, such as TrueProfile.io Recruiting, offer a way to significantly reduce the time-to-hire of medical professionals by up to 20-30 days through giving NHS recruiters access to a bank of roughly 500,000 pre-screened and authenticated medical professionals who are ready to move to new roles.
And that’s exactly why these technologies are revolutionising healthcare recruitment right now. These state-of-the-art tools will allow NHS recruiters and healthcare regulators to efficiently and safely connect with verified healthcare professionals worldwide, screening and authenticating professional documents in a fraction of the time such tasks previously took them.
A final word on COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic has taken the world by storm and is the only thing anybody is talking about – and rightly so.
However, while COVID-19 continues to stress-test the world’s best healthcare systems, the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of medical workers will continue to remain exempt from restrictions on freedoms of movements across national borders when seeking new employment opportunities. This means that there is still a golden opportunity for understaffed and underfunded NHS hospitals and healthcare organisations to take steps to rectify skills gaps and staff shortages.
Crucially, they can only do this by broadening their tech playbook and seeking out the latest cost-efficient solutions. In turn, healthcare regulators and NHS recruiters will have the much needed and absolutely necessary capability to act quickly when it comes to securing the best medical talent to meet their immediate needs, from anywhere in the world.
