Poaching war for staff is harming private care
By Robin Stride
Mounting staff recruitment and retention problems in private hospitals are hitting crisis point and threatening consultants’ support.
According to the former chief executive of the UK’s largest private hospital, HCA’s The Wellington, it is all-out war as independent sector bosses scramble to keep posts filled.
He revealed some are paying golden handshakes worth thousands of pounds to attract nurses to join them.
Bosses are fighting even within the same hospital group to sign up targeted individuals.
Other managers face huge problems keeping staff, whose loyalty has been financially ignored, working alongside new people given £5,000 signing-on fees.
Keith Hague
The current state of play was unveiled at the private healthcare sector’s major annual conference, Private Healthcare Summit 2022, run by market analysts LaingBuisson.
Keith Hague – at the Wellington Hospital for 12 years before orchestrating the development of the new Cleveland Clinic in London which opened this month – warned that some private hospitals were ‘fighting to survive’.
He said: ‘I know there are some huge problems in terms of recruitment and retention in the NHS, but in the private sector it is absolutely killing the way the private sector works.’
Tense situation
Chief executives were ‘killing one another to try to get hold of staff and not only are they competing against competitor hospitals, they are competing with hospitals in their own group. That’s how tense this situation is.’
One in the Midlands found a rival group offering a senior nurse £9,000 more to join them.
The employer said it could only afford to pay £5,000 extra, but the incumbent was persuaded to stay when it offered to send her on a course she had hoped to go on for years.
Mr Hague commented: ‘Business retention strategy? Absolutely not!’
More complex
If bosses needed more nurses pre-Covid, they might look to central Europe or chat with an agent in Australasia, but recruitment was now far more complex.
Mr Hague, now with associate Peter Goddard and running a new venture in executive healthcare recruitment called Goddard and Hague, said a chief executive at a London tertiary private hospital closed it down at the start of Covid.
‘A small portion were furloughed. The rest were made redundant and we were sat in front of this chief executive this week and he was saying “Why the hell did we do that?”’
Hospitals were all grabbing everybody else they could find purely for one thing – more money.
‘From my days in private hospital management, we made lots of mistakes, probably more than anyone in this room, but one thing we did learn, Peter and I, was that retention is not always about more money.
‘Certainly, in terms of the high-end clinical staff and the tertiary staff, critical care nurses, cardiac technologists and so on, it’s not about money there.
Dog eat dog
‘It is about development, skills, opportunity and the chance for people to grow within their own company and feel empowered by their company.
‘That’s all gone. It’s all gone; it’s dog eat dog out there and actually you wouldn’t think it, but it’s worse outside London. Small private hospitals are struggling to maintain their numbers.’
Private independent healthcare consultants had been decimated. ‘A lot of them have gone – they have made themselves redundant because they have no volume. A big London cardiologist with 20 people laid off all his staff. A lot of them retired early.’
Watchdog ‘not interested in solution to retention’
Mr Hague said his company went to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and requested some relief for private consultants so they could have free hospital consulting rooms and some medical staff costs paid through the hospital group.
But it was ‘just like you were asking the CMA if they would support drug dealers on the street because they had gone out of business. They were not interested.’
He said healthcare had not cared for its lower-paid workers as it should. ‘I as a CEO used to say to the HR director: “Look, just get them from The Philippines, India, Pakistan, maybe Portugal, central Europe.” And we were all guilty of bringing cheap labour in and we didn’t take care of them.
‘So what happened when Covid hit and when we came out of the EU was they walked away. I can’t tell you how complex recruitment is now in the independent sector. There are no retention strategies; nobody thinking clever about retention.
‘Their only retention strategy is “I’ll call the Nuffield hospital and we will offer this great lady another ten grand. And we will keep her. And did you say X was thinking about leaving? Let’s give her another five grand and send her on a course”.’