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Health : Sector Skills Assessment 2012


The Sector Skills Assessment for Health presents evidence on the sector’s skill needs and priorities. The report was prepared by Skills for Health.

Health : Sector Skills Assessment 2012 (PDF, 1.3 Mb) 

Published November 2012

This is the Sector Skills Assessment (SSA) for the Health sector. The aim of the report is to provide authoritative labour market intelligence (LMI) for the sector in order to inform the development of skills policy across the UK.

The Health sector makes a substantial contribution to the UK economy in output terms and international comparisons, whilst difficult, indicate that the UK Health sector is offering good value and quality to the population in many areas. In an environment of increasing demand for health services the sector will be challenged to raise its productivity and quality in the context of constrained government resources, with employers looking for substantial changes to the way in which the workforce is organised.

The report indicates that each of the major occupational groups in the sector is likely to experience significant shifts in the skills they need to develop. There will be a renewed focus on skills utilisation in the sector as organisations look at ways to cost effectively deliver services whilst maintaining quality of patient care. Professional and clinical occupations and managers and senior officials are likely to be called upon with increased urgency to develop the sector and lead it through a period of prolonged change.

SSAs combine top-down data from official sources with bottom-up sectoral intelligence to provide a consistent, comparable and rich understanding of the skills priorities within sectors across the four UK nations. The reports have been produced to a common specification developed by the UK Commission in consultation with the four UK and devolved governments and follow a consistent structure.

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