Accelerating NHS Workforce Readiness: What the 10-Year Plan Means for Credentialling

The NHS 10-Year Health Plan, published in July 2025, marks a pivotal shift in how care is delivered, managed, and governed. With the service under intense pressure to improve outcomes while reducing costs, the plan lays out three key transitions: shifting care from hospital to community settings, moving from analogue to digital systems, and transitioning from reactive sickness treatment to prevention-first care.

Underpinning these ambitions is a mandate for 2% annual productivity improvements over the next three years - a goal that cannot be achieved without addressing systemic inefficiencies in workforce deployment

The Workforce Challenge: Time-to-Hire Is Holding Back Care

Trusts across England continue to report long delays between job offer and start date, particularly for clinical roles. These delays. driven by manual credential checks, fragmented processes, and lack of digital oversight - slow down recruitment, increase agency reliance, and undermine patient care.

According to recent workforce reports, onboarding delays of weeks or even months are common. During this time, patients wait longer for treatment, staff rotas remain unfilled, and Trusts spend heavily on temporary staffing. In 2022 alone, NHS Trusts spent £3 billion on agency staff to fill workforce gaps (Oleeo, 2023).

This inefficiency isn’t sustainable - especially when every Trust is expected to contribute to the NHS’s 2% annual productivity uplift. To deliver more care with fewer resources, organisations need to accelerate time-to-hire, reduce administrative burden, and ensure that every clinician is deployed safely and compliantly.

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From Manual to Digital: Credentialling as a Workforce Enabler

To deliver on the productivity goals set out in the 10-Year Plan, Trusts need to improve the speed and efficiency of getting staff into post. Manual onboarding processes are a major source of delay, often adding weeks between job offer and start date. These delays leave gaps in rotas, reduce clinical capacity, and contribute to unnecessary reliance on agency staff.

Modernising credentialling is one of the most direct ways to address this. By moving to digital systems, Trusts can reduce onboarding time, track progress more clearly, and avoid repeated administrative work. Faster onboarding means staff are available to deliver care sooner, improving team stability and supporting service delivery.

For Trust HR and medical staffing teams, having real-time visibility into the status of checks allows earlier intervention when delays occur. This helps reduce bottlenecks and improves confidence in workforce planning. In a system under pressure, removing friction from onboarding can make a measurable difference in patient access and staff wellbeing.

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Digital Readiness: Meeting the Plan’s Technology Mandate

The NHS 10-Year Plan includes a system-wide push to digitise care delivery and operations. Trusts are expected to replace outdated paper-based systems with modern digital tools that support automation, data-sharing, and interoperability.

Credentially aligns directly with this vision. Our platform eliminates paper documentation, manual spreadsheets, and email chains, replacing them with a fully digital process that integrates seamlessly into existing NHS workflows. Whether it’s ID checks, professional registrations, or training validation, Credentially ensures everything is automated, auditable, and always up to date.

Achieving this kind of digital capability goes beyond streamlining operations - it equips Trusts to meet rising demands for visibility, accountability, and informed decision-making through reliable data.

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What About the Digital Staff Passport?

While the NHS had initially planned a national Digital Staff Passport to standardise workforce credentials, this programme was deprioritised and closed in April 2025. Although some interim tools remain in use at the Trust level, the plan’s ambition to reduce duplication and speed up workforce mobility still stands.

Credentially provides a local solution to that challenge today. With digital credential records that can be accessed across departments or sites, Trusts can redeploy staff quickly during surges, enable cross-site cover, and ensure consistency in compliance across teams without waiting for a national solution.

Delivering Against National and System Goals

Credentially helps NHS Trusts meet the most urgent workforce and compliance priorities laid out in the 10-Year Plan:

• Accelerate time-to-hire to contribute to the 2% annual productivity target
• Reduce reliance on agency staffing by enabling faster deployment of Trust-based staff
• Provide real-time, auditable assurance for CQC inspections and Board governance
• Align with ICS workforce goals around surge readiness, mobility, and equity
• Digitise legacy workflows in line with NHS England’s digital transformation expectations

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Conclusion: Credentialling at the Centre of NHS Reform

Workforce transformation is at the heart of the NHS 10-Year Plan. While many Trusts focus on recruitment pipelines and retention, few recognise that one of the biggest levers for change lies in the onboarding process itself.

Credentialling has evolved into a core function that directly impacts workforce productivity, patient safety, and the NHS's broader push for digital transformation.

With Credentially, NHS Trusts can modernise credentialling processes today, reducing costs, improving patient care, and strengthening regulatory confidence. In a system that must do more with less, getting staff into post quickly and compliantly is no longer optional. It’s essential.

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