Tag Archives: Richard Griffin

How NHS support staff support learning in the workplace

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Professor Richard Griffin, MBE is Visiting Professor of Healthcare Management at King’s Business School. (603 words)

NHS clinical support workers, such as Healthcare Assistants and Therapy Assistants, have been supporting learners in hospitals and other healthcare settings. Given the increase in demand for student support in NHS workplaces from work experience to vocational education placements, to apprenticeships and pre-registration degree students, this represents an additional, and much needed, source of capacity. It also represents a career development opportunity for support staff – an important group of NHS staff who are aspirant but, as mine and other’s research shows are frequently frustrated at the lack of opportunity to progress their careers.

Despite the importance of this topic and the apparently growing use of support staff in a learner support role, little is known about this activity, those who undertake it or the support and recognition they receive. To try to start to address this gap in knowledge, earlier this year we [1] undertook a national online survey of Allied Health Profession (AHP) support staff in England who supported students. Almost 260 people responded.

The full results will shortly be published but key findings are- Continue reading →

How the Health T Level can help the NHS and social care address their workforce crisis and support inclusive growth

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Professor Richard Griffin, MBE is Visiting Professor of Healthcare Management at King’s Business School. Today sees the publication of his report for The Gatsby Charitable Foundation: Inspiring the next generation: T-levels and health and social care workforce planning and progression (PDF). (640 words)

Both the NHS and social care face severe and enduring shortages of staff. Fit for the Future: The NHS 10 Year Plan for England published last year, highlighted the need for the NHS to build local, sustainable workforce pipelines and to recruit more people from the communities the NHS serves.

Recent research by King’s College London, funded by The Gatsby Charitable Foundation, suggests that T Levels – technical qualifications largely delivered by Further Education colleges – offer a route to support both objectives, alongside delivering wider benefits.

First introduced in 2020, T Levels are two-year technical qualifications for 16–19-year-olds, equivalent to three A Levels and including an industry placement. The T Level in Health launched in 2021 and is now the second most popular route, with almost 4,000 students in 2025. Continue reading →

How to improve health and social care unregistered staff’s education and development

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Richard Griffin MBE is Visiting Senior Research Fellow, King’s Business School. (434 words)

I write a fair bit about the challenges and barriers support workers can face. Research by King’s College London and others has identified persistent issues such as poor job design, lack of funding for training, pay levels that too often do not reflect the extended nature of the roles and poor progression pathways. I thought though, particularly in the run up to the Royal College of Midwives’ annual Maternity Support Worker Week (23-27 November) and the Royal College of Nursing’s first Nursing Support Worker Day (23 November), I would set out my views of some of the ways these problems can be addressed in the NHS. Continue reading →

Grow your own – an idea whose time has come (again)

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Richard Griffin MBE is Visiting Senior Research Fellow, King’s Business School. (869 words)

Back in 2010 I produced a paper for the Department of Health with the snappy title of Widening Participation Into Pre-registration Nursing Degree Programmes. Nursing was becoming an all degree profession and there was a concern at the time that this might narrow the pool of future recruits as vocational routes were closed. The document mapped pathways up to and into pre-registration degrees for existing support staff, including via the then current version of apprenticeships. It also set out the wider benefits of a “Grow Your Own” (GYO) approach to workforce development and recruitment. These included, not only securing future labour supply, but also helping ensure that the NHS workforce better reflected its local population, supporting diversity and reducing turnover.

Fast forward a decade and I’m having a conversation with an NHS Trust who had hoped to recruit from their existing support staff on to a degree apprenticeship. There is no shortage of candidates, but it appears the step up from support role to a pre-registration degree is too large for staff and the Trust is unable to recruit. The 2010 paper, which I repeated for Camilla Cavendish’s review three years later, made the point that GYO needs to be “end-to-end”, starting even before employment begins and delivering investment in the formal education of support staff at every level, creating clear pathways to mobilise what we called back then, the NHS “skills escalator”. GYO seeks to create progression steps creating horizontal and verticals career routes, avoiding the “gap” problem experienced by the Trust I was talking to. Continue reading →

Fair Care Work: A Post COVID-19 Agenda for Employment Relations in Health and Social Care

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Ian Kessler, Stephen Bach, Richard Griffin and Damian Grimshaw introduce their new paper, Fair care work. A post Covid-19 agenda for integrated employment relations in health and social care, published yesterday by King’s Business School. Lead author, Professor Kessler, is Deputy Director of the NIHR Policy Research Unit in Health and Social Care Workforce. (908 words)

The courage and sacrifice of the health and social care workforce have emblazoned themselves on the national consciousness as the challenge of COVID-19 continues. While classified as ‘key workers’, along with other occupations essential to the community in times of crisis, the distinctive contribution of frontline care workers, reflected in their direct and relentless engagement with the virus, has until recently been reflected in the Thursday night applause reserved for them. This public applause sits uneasily, however, with the treatment of over two million health and social care employees, mostly women, often from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, typically in undervalued, relatively low paid and insecure employment. In a new paper, we seek to kick start a policy debate on the development of fair care work, to stimulate discussion on a refreshed employment relations (ER) agenda which acknowledges and reflects the worth of care workers to our individual and communal well-being. Continue reading →

Is the answer to the NHS workforce crisis right in front of its eyes?

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Richard Griffin MBE,Visiting Senior Research Fellow, King’s Business School, today begins a series of guest posts on the healthcare workforce. He argues that, in the face of the widely acknowledged problem of shortages in this workforce, we should turn to current NHS support staff for part of the solution. (477 words)

Workforce is the biggest challenge facing the NHS. Not only is it short of 50,000 nurses, it also needs more podiatrists, midwives, radiographers and a host of other occupations. Total vacancies are approaching 110,000.

Whilst the government is committed to addressing this shortfall, a key question is – where will all those extra nurses, podiatrists, midwives and radiographers come from? Continue reading →