Responding to the NHS 10-Year Cancer Plan: workforce reality through the lens of lived experience

An introduction from Liaison Group

At Liaison Group, we work with healthcare organisations across the UK to help them deliver sustainable, high-quality care through better workforce planning, digital tools, and smarter use of resources.

Much of that work focuses on practical challenges: reducing agency spend, improving productivity, stabilising teams, and ensuring the right people are in the right place at the right time. But workforce transformation is never just about systems, data, or financial models. It is about the experience behind every workforce decision and every staffing gap.

Our Customer Operations Director, David Jones-Stanley, brings a perspective that connects these two worlds. With decades of experience working alongside healthcare providers on workforce effectiveness, digital rostering, and demand-led staffing models, David has long been part of the conversation around sustainable workforce planning.

In 2021, he experienced the system from a very different angle. Diagnosed with stage 3 oesophageal cancer at the age of 46, he underwent chemotherapy, major surgery, and a long recovery. That journey, later captured in his book Gulp, gave him a firsthand understanding of how workforce pressures are felt by the people who rely on the system most.

As the NHS moves forward with its 10-Year Cancer Plan, David offers a perspective shaped by both professional workforce expertise and lived patient experience.

From the patient chair to the workforce dashboard

By David Jones-Stanley

There are two ways to understand healthcare. One is through workforce dashboards, board papers, and transformation programmes. The other is from the patient chair. I’ve experienced both.

For most of my career, I’ve worked with healthcare organisations on workforce productivity, digital transformation, and operational improvement. The conversations were about demand and capacity, establishment control, agency reduction, digital rostering, and financial sustainability. They were important and necessary, but they were also, in many ways, abstract.

Then, in 2021, I was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer. In that moment, the workforce challenges I’d spent years discussing professionally became deeply personal. They were no longer a line in a financial report or a trend on a dashboard. They were the reason I waited for scans, sat in clinics, wondered if surgery would be delayed, and counted the days between appointments.

I describe cancer care as a chain of people, departments, and decisions. If one link in that chain breaks, the patient feels it immediately. And that chain is held together by the workforce.

What the 10-Year Cancer Plan is really asking for

The ambitions of the NHS cancer strategy are clear: earlier diagnosis, faster treatment, more personalised care, better survivorship support, and reduced inequalities. These are the right priorities. But every one of them depends on something very practical, people, time, and capacity.

Earlier diagnosis means more diagnostic sessions, more radiology staff, more endoscopy teams, and better coordination across services.

Faster treatment means theatre capacity, oncology clinics, chemotherapy teams, MDT coordination, and the administrative support to hold it all together.

Personalised care means time for conversations, continuity of clinicians, and clinical nurse specialists who are not carrying unsustainable caseloads.

These are not just policy ambitions. They are workforce requirements, and they depend on having the right people available at the right time to support each patient’s journey.

The hidden cost of reactive workforce models

Across healthcare, many organisations still operate in reactive staffing models. Hiring needs are often submitted at the last minute. Managers lack clear visibility of future demand.

Agency staff are used to plug gaps rather than support planned activity.

In one healthcare case study, the organisation found a need to gain earlier visibility of data, in particular with regards to recruitment needs and workforce risk planning for absence, retirement, maternity, or unexpected increases in service demands. With teams permanently stuck in reactive mode, an issue was identified not of the capability of the recruitment team, but the absence of demand planning.

This issue is not unusual. It is repeated across the system. From a patient perspective, reactive workforce models translate into delays, cancelled clinics, uncertainty, and disrupted treatment pathways.

In my own journey, waiting became the background noise of treatment, waiting for scans, waiting for results, waiting for MDT decisions, waiting for surgery dates. But much of that waiting is not just clinical complexity. It is the result of workforce constraints.

The moment workforce became personal

One of the most important people in my cancer journey wasn’t a surgeon or an oncologist. It was my clinical nurse specialist. She coordinated appointments across multiple hospitals, aligned scans with MDT timelines, and helped me navigate a complex pathway.

Without that coordination, the system would have felt like a maze.

That experience changed how I think about workforce roles. It reminded me that administrators are part of clinical outcomes, coordinators are part of patient safety, and scheduling teams are part of treatment timelines. Workforce is not a back-office function. It is the operating system of healthcare.

The principle: the right people in the right place

At Liaison Workforce, we often talk about a simple but powerful concept: the right people, in the right place, at the right time, at the right cost.

Achieving that requires clear governance, demand-led workforce planning, bank-first staffing models, and the right digital tools to support visibility and control. When organisations move away from unchallenged, long-term agency placements and toward more structured workforce models, they regain control of both spend and staffing stability.

In one NHS trust, a focused programme to address long-term agency placements transformed how temporary staffing was managed. By introducing clearer processes, strengthening governance, and supporting teams to move staff onto more appropriate engagement models, the organisation eliminated long-term placements and reduced total spend by £497,000 in just three months, a reduction of more than 50%.

Over a longer period, net savings increased by 320% compared to the previous year, while communication between departments and workforce teams improved significantly.

Where workforce solutions support the Cancer Plan

The NHS 10-Year Cancer Plan is ambitious, and rightly so. But delivering it requires a workforce platform that supports demand-led planning.

Digital rostering provides real-time visibility of gaps, supports demand-based rota creation, and integrates workforce data across services. For patients, that means fewer cancelled clinics, more predictable treatment timelines, and better continuity of care.

Workforce planning tools allow organisations to align staffing with real demand, forecast vacancies earlier, and improve operational visibility. In the healthcare organisation mentioned above, this approach uncovered more than £1million in potential savings, identified dozens of hidden vacancies, and saved hundreds of hours of administrative time.

Bank-first and collaborative staffing models add flexibility for substantive staff, reduce reliance on agency workers, and stabilise clinical teams. And stable teams are better for patients.

Those are financial and operational results. But behind each number is something more tangible: a team with clearer oversight of its workforce, fewer unplanned gaps, and more stable staffing arrangements. That means services that run as intended, roles that are managed proactively, and patient pathways that are less likely to be disrupted by last-minute staffing pressures.

What lived experience adds to workforce strategy

My cancer journey changed how I think about workforce transformation. It made the consequences of workforce decisions very real.

It reminded me that every rota gap creates uncertainty for a patient, every cancelled clinic has a human cost, and every delay carries emotional weight. Workforce transformation is not just about productivity, financial sustainability, or agency reduction. It is about experience, patient experience, staff experience, and human experience.

The real foundation of the 10-Year Cancer Plan

The cancer strategy is ambitious, and it should be. But it will not be delivered by policy documents alone.

It will be delivered in clinics, in chemotherapy suites, in operating theatres, in MDT meetings, and in the staffing scheduling that make all of that possible.

Behind every diagnosis, treatment, operation, and follow-up is a workforce decision. And if we get those decisions right, patients feel it, staff feel it, and the system feels it.

A final thought

I didn’t choose to become a cancer patient. But that experience gave me a perspective I carry into every workforce conversation.

The NHS 10-Year Cancer Plan is about more than targets, strategies, or technology. It is about whether the right people are there when a patient needs them.

Because from the patient chair, that is what matters most. And from the workforce dashboard, that is exactly what we should be designing for.