Working from home has been permanently adopted by parts of the NHS bureaucracy as staff do not use office ‘hot desks’
- Around 30 of NHS England’s 42 Integrated Care Boards have introduced or are in the process of implementing ‘agile’ or ‘hybrid’ work policies
- UCIs manage billions of pounds plus NHS budgets and employ over 20,000 people
Working from home has been adopted permanently by large parts of the health service bureaucracy, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Responses to requests for freedom of information indicate that 30 of the 42 NHS Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) in England have introduced or are in the process of adopting ‘agile’ or ‘hybrid’ work policies.
Formally established last July, ICBs manage NHS budgets in excess of a billion pounds and collectively employ more than 20,000 staff.
The MoS also asked each ICB how many of their core staff were in the office on a given weekday – Wednesday, November 17.
That was the day Chancellor Jeremy Hunt issued his autumn statement, warning that the government had to make “tough decisions about public finances.”
Working from home has been permanently adopted by large parts of the NHS bureaucracy (stock image)
None of the ICB had tracked how many employees worked from home, but half provided figures on the number of desks booked through hot-desk systems.
Of the 21 UCIs that provided data, on average only 15 percent of staff had booked a desk by November 17. At the ICB in Cornwall and Isles of Scilly, which has 316 employees, only three desks were booked – less than one per cent of their staff.
Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg said: ‘When so few staff at UCIs meet face-to-face on a regular basis, it raises the question of whether they can properly oversee the huge amounts of NHS funds in their care.’