About First Response
Learn about our mission and core values, and what makes us different to other agencies.
Who we are
We provide a best in class uniquely sourced and comprehensively trained talent pool of professionals for Health and Social Care, including specialist and residential settings. Our board of directors, stakeholders and advisors from across NHS, Local Government and the VCSE sector provide us with a unique perspective allowing us to operate a model that is co-designed and produced with the with the advancement of workforce policy and quality practice at its forefront.
In a market containing countless recruitment agencies and brands from large corporates to SME’s we separate ourselves with an altruistic ambition to serve the sector and the staff ahead of our own commercial gain.
How we work
We do this by aligning our approach to recruiting, retaining, rewarding, developing and training to the NHS Workforce and Long Term Plans objectives amongst other locally led strategic and mandatory requirements.
We understand the value of our ability to provide a new and unique approach to assisting our clients and wider stakeholders across the NHS and Local Government in delivering future workforce agendas such as the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan and the Health and Care Act 2022 and are therefore structured to not only provide an essential talent pool to assist in the required provisions and placements of first class nursing and healthcare professionals into a variety of settings, but also ensure those professionals are provided with continuous learning and professional development irrespective of them being exclusive to our agency’s job opportunities or indeed placed by FRH&C at all.
We seek to create a dedicated community of practice for all of our registered and eligible professionals, using and applying the income we generate to ensuring the future of standards are maintained and improved, by caring for the carers/professionals, upskilling them and creating employment pathways and ensuring employee development opportunities are available.
We seek to do this for both experienced and young carers, in spite of the inability to place them into many of the higher grade and lucratively sought after roles most all recruitment agencies may prioritise and focus upon, as we realise that while they are a smaller opportunities to place and therefore generate revenue against, they are the entire future of nursing and care.
We do not wish to ring-fence any professional who registers on our rosters to work exclusively and be placed by us, we aspire to develop people irrespective, and we realise that the value of our network, community of practice and organisation is the thing that links us, not a contractual obligation or demand.
Why
At a time when many aspects of the health and care system requiring long term planning and investment have been neglected, the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan stands out as a rare attempt to make good decisions now that will impact the quality of, and people’s access to care in the future. Our vision is to support this and
The Health and Care Act 2022 (the Act) contains the biggest reforms to the NHS in nearly a decade, laying the foundations to improve health outcomes by joining up NHS, social care and public health services at a local level and tackling growing health inequalities. The majority of the Act is focused on developing system working with integrated care systems being put on a statutory footing through the creation of integrated care board. It also moves the NHS away from competitive re tendering by default and towards collaborative delivery.
Challenges & opportunities
Here are some of the challenges (not limited to) our clients and organisations across the sector face related to workforce plans and legislative demands and targets concerning approaches to both staffing and training requirements, which we are dedicated to helping solve and assisting and collaborating as required as a system partner not just an agency.
Reducing reliance on international recruitment and temporary staffing
The plan outlines the requirement to reduce the NHS’s over-reliance on international recruitment and temporary staffing, and expects a decrease in both these factors through implementing education and training expansion. This expansion would lead to an anticipated decrease in international recruitment from the current 24 per cent of all new joiners across the NHS (excluding dentistry and community pharmacy) to 9–10.5 per cent a year by 2036/37, and in reliance on temporary staffing in full-time equivalent (FTE) terms from 9 per cent in 2021/22 to around 5 per cent from 2032/33 onwards. The plan notes the importance of temporary staffing solutions in providing flexibility for staff and an opportunity for extra income. The plan notes that over the next 15 years, the NHS will need to further strengthen its approach to offering a blended career, where staff have the flexibility to work in an NHS bank, but that this should not be the only route to staff having a working pattern that suits them. The plan aims to reduce agency expenditure in secondary, community and mental health providers as shortfalls reduce.
Non-registered workforce
There are some NHS staff groups that require no formal registration with a professional regulator, such as health care support workers. The plan predicts that among the non-registered workforce, the biggest shortfall will be in health care support workers, and the plan states that NHS England will look to run recruitment exercises at scale for entry-level NHS jobs, and will work in partnership with Jobcentre Plus where appropriate, including continuing a national recruitment programme. The plan does not acknowledge that if the NHS seeks to boost the numbers of health care support workers in this way, this needs to be done in co-ordination with the social care sector – otherwise the NHS will be in direct competition with the social care sector for the same staff.
Nursing
The plan outlines a need to increase adult nursing training places by 65–80 per cent by 2030/31, with training places increasing by 41 per cent to almost 28,000 over the next six years. On mental health nursing and learning disability nursing specifically, the plan sets out an ambition to significantly increase training places by 93 per cent and 50 per cent respectively, by 2031/32, with some of these increases (13 per cent and 16 per cent respectively) seen by 2025/26. These two areas of the nursing workforce are facing the most severe shortages.
This nursing growth builds on the expansion already planned as part of the 2019 government manifesto commitment to the 50,000 Nurses Programme. When this programme was announced without a workforce plan to support it, there were questions around whether meeting such headline-focused targets would be adequate in meaningfully solving the issue of nursing workforce shortages. Plans to increase staff numbers based on the targets calculated by the modelling go much further than previous partial initiatives like the 6,000 more GPs and 50,000 more nurses commitments – the former of which has not been on track for some time.
Public health
Plans to expand the public health workforce only cover as far as 2023/24, with an aim to expand training places by 13 per cent, working with national, local and regional systems partners to address the demand and supply challenges of the public health workforce.
The plan covers the pharmacy workforce employed by the NHS, and primary care and community pharmacy contractors delivering funded services in the NHS. It confirms that all newly qualified pharmacists will be independent prescribers, states an ambition to continue expanding the clinical role of community pharmacy professionals in patient care pathways, and outlines plans to expand training places for pharmacists by nearly 50 per cent to around 5,000 places by 2031/32.