Health unions and opposition politicians blamed the drop on labour government mis­handling of NHS finances, but there was disagreement over the extent of the fall for front-line services.

In the NHS, the headcount dropped by 17,000, or 1.3 per cent, to 1.34m. The biggest decline – of 16,600, or 6 per cent – was in support staff such as nursing assistants and auxiliaries, according to the NHS information centre.

Lord Hunt was pathetically quoted as saying that a small fall in the overall headcount should not distract from the fact that the NHS employed over 279,000 more people than it did in 1997, including 34,338 extra doctors and 79,479 more nurses.

Comparisons with previous years, however, were clouded by the decision to take into account double counting of some jobs in the 2006 figures.

Andrew Lansley, the Tory health spokesman, said the fall in headcount would have been almost 10,000 higher but for the change in the counting method.

Peter Carter, general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, said: “When you dig below the surface even further, an estimated 17 per cent of the headline increase in nurse numbers [since 1997] is made up of double-counting existing nurses working extra shifts.

“Meanwhile, internationally recruited nurses, who make up a significant number of the extra nurses, now face the prospect of having to leave at the end of their contracts under new immigration laws.”

Unison, the largest public sector union, said: “These alarming figures appear to confirm our fears that health workers’ jobs are now being lost because welcome extra cash is often being sucked into an endless black hole of ‘strategic’ reforms, which don’t appear to be linked to many meaningful front line patient care outcomes.”

From:
http://search.ft.com/ftArticle?queryText=NHS+workers&y;=0&aje=true&x;=0&id;=070426011621

These new NHS staffing levels show that Tony Bliar last year either blatantly lied or was completely incompetent when he claimed last summer that only a “few hundred” NHS staff had been made redundant.

Health Direct last year counted 19,568 NHS redundancies. With more to come.

At the beginning of January 05, 2007 Health Direct posted: Report on NHS staffing angers unions as it predicts 36,000 NHS jobs lost this year

The National Health Service is set to shed more than 36,000 jobs this year before facing “very volatile” changes in its workforce that could leave it with thousands more hospital consultants than it can afford to employ, according to a leaked document from the Department of Health.

At the same time, however, big cuts in nurse and medical training budgets last year and this year could mean the service will be short of 14,000 nurses, 1,200 family doctors and 1,100 junior hospital staff by 2011.