Important Investment Signals, But NHS Success Depends on Tackling Workforce Shortages in Medical Physics and Clinical Engineering
The Government’s Budget this week set out several welcome commitments for the NHS, including targeted investment in diagnostics, digital transformation, and capital upgrades. These are positive indicators of support for modernising healthcare infrastructure. However, it remains clear that the most significant challenge facing the NHS today is not technology or equipment, it is people.
For professions within Medical Physics and Clinical Engineering (MPCE), workforce pressures have become one of the most serious and persistent risks to service delivery, innovation, and patient safety. The Budget did not sufficiently recognise or address this urgent issue.
At IPEM, we hear directly from department leaders across the UK who are struggling with:
- Critical shortages in specialist agendas, particularly in radiotherapy physics, nuclear medicine, radiation safety, imaging physics, and clinical engineering governance.
- Growing demand driven by advances in technology, rising patient numbers, and the expansion of diagnostic and treatment pathways.
- A widening skills gap, as services increasingly rely on sophisticated AI, imaging, and therapeutic technologies requiring specialist scientific and engineering expertise.
- Long recruitment times, limited training pipeline capacity, and retention pressures.
Technological investment alone cannot deliver outcomes without the trained workforce required to deploy, manage, assure, and safeguard that technology.
While we cautiously welcome elements of the Budget, including commitments to improve productivity, expand diagnostic capacity, and reduce reliance on outsourced services, these goals will only be achievable if the Government urgently prioritises workforce expansion, increases training capacity, and long-term investment in the medical physics and clinical engineering professions.
We also need to recognise the highly specialist nature of the scientific and MPCE workforce and acknowledge that previous workforce plans have not fully reflected these requirements. Robust workforce planning, grounded in accurate data and genuine insight, is essential to ensure services are sustainable and fit for the future.
In the coming months, IPEM will continue to work with government bodies, NHS England, and sector partners to advocate for:
- A fully funded workforce plan for MPCE, aligned with national diagnostic and treatment ambitions.
- Increased training pipeline capacity, including clinical scientist and technologist routes.
- Support for retention, career progression, with allocated time for training.
- Better utilisation of clinical engineers and medical physicists to unlock system efficiencies and patient safety improvements.
The Budget acknowledges the importance of modernising the NHS, but the NHS cannot modernise without the people who make modern healthcare possible. Addressing MPCE workforce shortages must now become a top national priority.
Matthew Dunn, Member Trustee
Gill Collinson, CEO