Board Vacancies and Commercial Spend Collection

From April 2020, the Research, Evaluation and Insights team (formerly Talent Insights) in the Workforce, Training and Education Directorate, NHS England will manage a quarterly collection and reporting service on board level vacancies across NHS Providers and Integrated Care Boards (ICBs), on behalf of the National Talent Board and Regional Talent Boards. This will include a quarterly collection on commercial spend in respect of these vacancies. 

Note, that data was collected for CCGs up to Quarter 1 2022/2023 which covers the period 1 April 2022 to 30 June 2022. This work will help to support the actions laid out in the NHS Long Term Plan and the We are the NHS: People Plan 2020/2021. The data your organisations provide will help us to identify vacancies and to develop and deploy talent. The main goal is to understand both the short and long-term workforce needs at a regional, system and national level and to better understand the talent pool within the NHS. Building into the competency frameworks and succession planning for board level roles in NHS Providers and ICBs that will be used to underpin recruitment, appraisals and development processes for talent pipeline. 

In addition to this quarterly collection of vacancies, we will continue to collect data on external agency spend, and this will move from an annual collection to a quarterly basis. This aggregated data will enable us to understand the profile and trends around external agency use. From this we can look at how the talent pools can be shaped to reduce reliance on external agencies in the identification of our NHS talent.