Health Secretary Nicola Sturgeon announced that due to the pressure put on her to make job cuts, she will have to reduce NHS jobs by 4000 over the course of the year. This will of course not appease healthcare recruitment agencies, who are receiving very mix signals about how much cutting the NHS will be expected to do.

The problem is 2 fold here, service and cost saving. Ms Strugeon stated that even though the NHS is and always will be a top priority for the government, the fact that there has been a £500 million cut in the overall Scottish Budget, the NHS actually received a funding increase.

Recruitment agencies would therefore be surprised by this information and why there would be a need for job cuts to be made, not only that but the fact that this could as the Unions warned cause concerns over the level of service that the NHS would provide.

The truth of the matter is the NHS budgets are extremely tight and with such little movement in these budgets they don’t allow for cost increases a clear example of this would be Medicine. The cost of purchasing medicine has increase dramatically and without budgets pricing this in then logically the cost of paying for these drugs has to come from somewhere.

The Scottish Patients Association added that it is not Sturgeon faults that money is in short supply but finds it hard to accept comments from the government saying this will not affect patient care. This implies that there was poor management in place before hand that were just taking on staff for the sake of it, extremely unlikely.

We will of course have to wait and see how these cuts will truly affect the NHS service, but with 1500 nurses and midwifery posts about to disappear, it leaves me to think of only one possible outcome in the service provided.

Healthcare recruitment agencies were warned by Nicola Hopper, national resourcing manager at Bupa Care Services that recruiters have to provide `value for money`.

The Recruitment and Employment Confederation also stated that recruiters have an important role to play in providing a cost effective solution.

With George Osbourne announcing £6 billion cuts next week, there is an emphasis on quality of services being maintained within the Public Sector, with George Osbourne adding that they believe this can be achieved without affecting frontline services.

There is however a lot of contradicting information out there, that suggest that cuts will happen to frontline services and even the Royal College of Nursing, on data they have obtained from 26 trusts, suggests that 5,600 posts could be in jeopardy but worst case this figure could be as much as 36,000 NHS staff.

Union also warned that the NHS has put aside £2bn, to be used for redundancy pay-offs that will occur. Unison claims that the guidance given by the NHS framework for 2010/11, states that trusts should set aside 2% of their budgets for any one off commitments. Health Secretary Andrew Lansley added that trusts which manage to save this 2% figure can decide how to spend it and this does include redundancies.

My analysis of all this, is that although the ConDem are making the right noises, using phases such as `efficiency cuts` and frontline services unaffected. I think it is clear especially within the NHS that job cuts are inevitable and that frontline staff is an area that will be affected too. This does however mean that recruitment agencies will be used to maintain a level of service required, however like I wrote at the beginning of this blog, there will be a much larger emphasis on the quality of service and providing value for money.

The Office for National Statistics were released with John Philpott, chief economic adviser at the chartered institute of personnel and Development, stating that the figures send a clear SOS message to the new coalition government of the condition of the UK labour market.

Unemployment rose to 2.51 million, this is the highest it has been in 15 years. There are also 1 million part time workers looking for full time work and a concerning statistic is that people in the 35-49 age group are the hardest hit.

The concern with this age group is that, these people usually represent the breadwinners of the family, paying of the mortgage and bills. In the last 3 months 85,000 people in this group have left their jobs, a drop of 0.8%, which is much higher than the 0.3% drop across all age groups. Although this cannot be classed as a trend yet, many people will be keeping a close eye on this statistic.

Brendan Barber, TUC general secretary, stated that her big concern is that the new government does not cut support for the unemployed. This is a particular concern in the public sector now, with £6 billion cost savings having to be found. However healthcare recruitment agencies will pleased to hear Cameron state that frontline services will not be affected by the cuts and the NHS overall will have a confirmed and committed spend levels over the next 5 years.

One more stat that was of interest from the ONS was that there was in fact an indication of wage growth. This grew by 4% on annual basis, from 2.5% last quarter, a sharp increase. Although strangely enough, it showed the private sector increase by 3.6%, whilst public sector wages grew by 4.4%, a situation that of course cannot be maintained.

Overall there is much to be concerned about and recruitment agencies in general should be able to give you a good indication of number of vacancies there are in your sector and what wage can be expected. The message got from all this, is that the new coalition government have got to get to work as soon as and I hope that the emergency budget being held in a few weeks time, will demonstrate how we as a country can cope in dealing with this very large debt.