“It’s not ‘tough’; it’s impossible,” said Roland Sheehan, director at TFS Healthcare, which serves clients across the UK. 

The challenges of recruiting and placing nurses, ensuring the safety of the healthcare staff they place, supporting clients and working with operating changes in the NHS itself occurring as a result of the crisis has led to TFS “re-engineering our whole business” in the last two weeks, Sheehan said. 

The re-engineering has included steps such as moving staff internally within the TFS business to focus on different specialities – for example, from support roles to compliance “so we can get candidates compliant and safely working”, he said.

With TFS’s agency nurses, the challenge is to explore how more can be reallocated to departments with the greatest needs, such as intensive care units and respiratory wards “because those areas have been hit the hardest”, he said.

With many staff already working seven-day weeks in the crisis, the TFS teams will also forego the upcoming four-day Easter holiday weekend and “work as normal days because that’s what the NHS are doing with their nursing staff, and that’s what we need to do to support the NHS”, Sheehan said. The plan has had “no pushback at all” from TFS staff, he added.

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