This weeks star of the week is Tony Riley, a healthcare interim with experience across the NHS including clinical governance, PCTs and NHS foundation trusts.

How is the interim market from your perspective?
The interim market has completely dried up in the NHS. The trend now seems to be a reduction in rates, or interims moving to permanent positions simply to weather the current climate; but even the permanent market has gone funny as the fallout from the White Paper has not been fully established with lots of roles not being made available to those outside of the NHS as yet.

I think interims have certainly been hit quite hard in this environment particularly since the election. Some might even say that interims are being targeted. The market declined very quickly. As a result of the policy to reduce management costs many organisations reduced their interim complement completely. All of a sudden there weren’t many positions left. This is a major problem for PCTs and NHS trusts as there is a lot of work yet to be started, especially with the new agenda concerning the movement of management to GPs.


What effect has the CSR had on both your job security and future prospects?
There were already cost cutting plans in place before the election through the QIPP agenda and the NHS was gearing up for that.  The agenda has somewhat increased and also the speed of the change and management has also taken people by surprise. So much so people are still working through the plans.  A target of £20bn of NHS expenditure was to be saved over the next four years. The CSR has simply heaped more pressure onto management. This has meant that a lack of manpower will start to affect the plans that were in place prior to the election and CSR. Without sufficient management to handle restructure I can only see the situation getting worse. At least in the short term. New models of working are sure to come about at the end and interim work is sure to change somewhat.


How do you see the interim market in the short and long term?
As said, the market is currently very poor and I don’t think it will improve much in the short term. However, I do keep hearing about certain dates on the horizon for the market to pick up. Some are saying after Christmas, others are saying around March. I think opportunities will arise in the long term, the problem is that you can’t plan ahead for them, which is why many interims are settling for permanent roles and there is the compounding factor of in-betweeners who are between permanent jobs saturating the interim market at lower rates. However, the NHS agenda for transformation is massive and it should pick up over the next few months.

Have you seen an increase in job opportunities from the private sector as public sector positions have declined?
I haven’t seen the private sector pick up any of the slack from the public sector. The skills of interims in the public sector are certainly transferable so its not about different sectors needing different skillsets. Private health is no where near the size of the NHS so I very much doubt that they will make any significant impact on the market.  Managing health is also complex and it’s hard to sell that to the private sector.

And finally…

Have you been forced to reduce your rates since the general election?
I think everyone has been forced to reduce their rates, and that’s fine but there is a formula that you have to make this work and if you compromise that you may well end up doing stuff for almost nothing.. I’ve heard a few horror stories of interim senior managers interviewing for new posts and finding at the last minute that the rate has been lowered. Everyone is trying to keep their heads held high right now. To admit there is a problem makes you look a bit negative. So you just have to go with it when there are so many interims and so few positions.