Insourcing Services | Secure Healthcare Solutions

The NHS offers a universal care promise, but even with superior infrastructure, the capacity is not always translated into treated patients. Demand for clinical services continues to increase, while staff shortages overwhelm NHS teams. NHS trusts look for clinical teams that run additional lists safely and consistently using the insourcing model.

The NHS Workforce Alliance Insourcing Framework provides a compliant and operational route for NHS hospitals to bring in fully governed clinical teams to deliver clinical activities on-site. It allows these organisations to increase productivity without capital expansion or long procurement cycles.

In this blog, let’s explore how the NHS Workforce Alliance framework is a practical tool for accelerating elective recovery.

What is the NHS Workforce Alliance Insourcing Framework?

Insourcing allows NHS trusts to tackle backlogs and retain capacity planning in-house by extending medical and clinical services using spare and out-of-hours capacity within the trust. Medical or clinical providers with specialist capabilities deliver these end-to-end services compliant with the NHS workforce alliance framework.

The framework for insourcing services supports the Provision of Healthcare Services by the NHS and public bodies. It’s free to access and offers support for the delivery of clinical services to meet waiting time targets. For adult and paediatric patient services, the NHS Workforce Alliance insourcing framework provides access to various services such as:

Diagnostics and diagnostic imaging
Dermatology
Cardiology
Endoscopy
ENT
General and specialist surgery
Gynaecology
Ophthalmology
Urology
Orthopaedics
Physiotherapy

The framework provides a cost-effective and compliant solution to contract with providers for working alongside NHS teams. The consistent standards of the framework ensure appropriate delivery of services with NHS compliance.

Why NHS Waiting Lists Keep Growing

In the UK, NHS waiting times for healthcare have risen to critical levels. Waiting list balloons due to the following reasons:

Volume of new referrals continues to grow due to an ageing population with increasingly complex needs that outpace completed treatments.
Chronic staff vacancies exist across specialities, limiting the number of consultations and procedures that can be performed.
Hospitals experience a significant backlog in terms of investment for hospital expansion and maintenance, leading to limited estate and a lack of modern equipment.
Bed blocking continues to increase as the capacity gap in adult social care is on the rise.
Administrative complexities and outdated IT systems hinder the ability of the NHS staff to perform efficiently.

How the Workforce Alliance Insourcing Model Works

The NHS Workforce Alliance’s insourcing model provides a procurement framework. NHS hospitals can use it to hire external clinical teams for delivering clinical services within their hospital premises during spare capacity hours, like evenings and weekends. The end-to-end clinical service model works in the following manner:

Services are performed on the NHS premises using existing hospital infrastructure.
The provider supplies a multidisciplinary team, which can include consultants, nurses, and support staff, to work alongside NHS regular staff.
The provider is responsible for clinical oversight, including liability, while the trust continues to retain control over patient pathways and records.
Contracts are typically based on specific deliverables, for example, completing 20 diagnostic scans per day.

The NHS Workforce Alliance Framework RM6276 simplifies the insourcing process by providing a list of pre-vetted suppliers who are pre-checked for quality, compliance, and NHS Employers Check Standards. Insourcing cost is generally set at a discounted NHS National Tariff with a flexible contracting option through Direct Award (choosing a provider directly) or Further Competition (securing the best value provider).

Adhering to the framework, the trust identifies the backlog area and selects a provider from the pre-vetted suppliers. The direct award option speeds up the process while ensuring compliance with the framework. Once the call-off contract is signed, service mobilisation begins. The chosen insourcing provider completes activity delivery and reports to the NHS.

How Insourcing Reduces NHS Waiting Lists

The insourcing service providers, once contracted, start activating existing hospital resources outside of core hours, such as in the evenings and weekends, for service deliveries. They bring external clinical teams to work on-site so that NHS trusts can increase their patient throughput without additional overhead costs or patient disruption.

Insourcing reduces waiting lists by running additional sessions in NHS trusts’ operating theatres, diagnostic suites, and clinics. Insourcing enables NHS trusts to meet the 18-week Referral to Treatment (RTT) targets by having clinical teams fill individual gaps. While the NHS retains control, the insourcing provider manages the entire patient pathway, ensuring efficiency and high volume. Patients experience faster treatment at their own hospital with continuity of care.

Key Benefits for NHS Trusts

NHS Trusts can strategically expand clinical capacity and maintain strict operational and financial control with an insourcing model. Using the NHS Workforce Alliance framework to hire insourcing providers offers the following benefits:

Increased utilisation of theatres and diagnostics
Faster elective recovery
Pressure relief for substantive teams
Reduced reliance on high-cost ad-hoc staffing
Tariff-aligned service delivery
Continued control of patient pathways
Continuity of care for patients at their local hospitals by teams they already trust
Reduced pressure on NHS staff

When the Workforce Alliance Framework Works Best

When the NHS trust has the physical capacity but lacks the staff to use it, the Workforce Alliance Framework offers the best solution. It is ideal in the following scenarios:

Out-of-hours capacity: Hospital facilities are used during evenings and weekends when they are dormant, so that the infrastructure gets used for patient service delivery.
Rapid elective recovery: Allows NHS trusts to meet their 18-week standard RTT targets by mobilising a full clinical team quickly.
Specialised backlogs: High-volume and low-complexity procedures can be quickly delivered by insourcing providers.
Budgetary constraints: When NHS trusts don’t have funds for expensive outsourcing or agency staffing, the insourcing model works as services are priced at or below the NHS national tariff.

Insourcing is a short-to-medium term solution that can work well for 6-12 months. However, long-term staffing shortages must be met using recruitment and training initiatives. Also, when NHS trusts already operate at full capacity, the insourcing model may not be the ideal solution.

NHS Insourcing Services in Wolverhampton

The right insourcing partner acts as an extension of the NHS team. Their multidisciplinary workforce supply caters to the varied patient needs in the NHS hospitals. By partnering with a locally responsive provider, NHS teams can reduce risk, stabilise services, and reduce pressure on substantive staff. Explore NHS Insourcing Services in Wolverhampton offered by Secure Healthcare Solutions for expanding elective capacity with existing NHS infrastructure in a low-risk and compliant manner.

NHS trusts manage diverse types of hospitals, clinics, and specialist services in England. The increasing patient demand, tighter resources, and increasing cost of healthcare make it harder for the NHS to keep services accessible to patients.

Therefore, NHS trusts look for solutions to organise work, execute day-to-day solutions, and take care of patients without any compromise.

For this purpose, two approaches are commonly used — insourcing and outsourcing. Both extend capacity, but they work in different ways, impacting hospitals and patients differently. In this blog, we have explained insourcing vs outsourcing in the NHS, their meanings, differences, and the insourcing advantage.

What is insourcing in the NHS?

Insourcing in the NHS is a service arrangement where an external clinical provider delivers necessary clinical services inside the premises of an NHS trust.

Depending on the needs, the provider uses theatres, clinics, or diagnostic centres of the trust and provides patient services using a whole team of doctors, nurses, anesthesiologists, and others.

NHS retains full control of governance, patient records, and pathways. The provider brings their own staff and works in sessions, while the activity remains within the NHS systems.

Patients don’t go anywhere, and often, patients won’t even know that they are getting services from insourced staff.

More commonly, trusts use an insourcing model for fulfilling services like endoscopy, outpatient work, elective procedures, and diagnostics when they need extra capacity on the NHS grounds.

What is outsourcing in the NHS?

When the NHS contracts external providers to deliver healthcare services on behalf of the NHS, but outside of the NHS services, it’s called outsourcing. The third-party provider is responsible, under contract, for staffing, equipment, and service delivery.

In outsourcing, the NHS monitors standards, but patient pathways are self-managed by external providers. While external providers are still expected to follow NHS guidelines, the control is minimal.

Often, patients have to be moved to these external facilities for diagnostics, outpatient clinics, elective surgery, or even routine care when an outsourcing model is used to extend capacity or access specialist facilities.

Now that we have defined insourcing and outsourcing, we will show you the differences between the two in the next section.

Insourcing Vs Outsourcing NHS: Key Differences

Here are the key differences between insourcing and outsourcing in the NHS:

Type of Care	Level of Independence	Type of Support Provided	Living Arrangement	Best Suited For
Assisted Living	Moderate to High	Help with daily tasks such as cleaning, meals, and medication reminders	Private flats or apartments with shared communal areas	Older adults who want independence with light support
Residential Care Home	Low to Moderate	24-hour personal care, meals, and supervision	Private or shared rooms in a managed facility	Seniors needing regular personal care but not medical treatment
Nursing Home	Low	24-hour nursing and medical support	Managed facility with healthcare staff	People with complex medical needs or ongoing conditions
Home Care (Domiciliary Care)	High	Carers visit at home to help with personal tasks	Individual’s own home	Those who wish to stay at home with flexible support hours
Retirement Housing (Sheltered Housing)	Very High	Minimal or no personal care; emergency call systems available	Self-contained flats or bungalows	Independent seniors who need a secure and social environment
Insourcing – Location	On-site	Work takes place inside NHS premises	NHS facilities	Trusts wanting care delivered internally
Outsourcing – Location	External	Work shifts to an external provider’s site	Provider’s facilities	Trusts lacking space or resources
Insourcing – Control	High	NHS oversees pathways, records, and governance on-site	NHS-managed environment	Organisations needing full operational control
Outsourcing – Infrastructure	Provider-dependent	Uses the provider’s own space, staff, and equipment	External infrastructure	When specialist facilities are required
Practical Use (Comparison)	Varies	Insourcing: when space exists. Outsourcing: when rooms or specialists are lacking	Mixed	Decision-making for NHS operational planning

While both extend capacity and provide clinical support teams, NHS trusts choose insourcing more often for the reasons given below.

Why NHS Trusts Are Choosing Insourcing in 2025

Some of the reasons why NHS trusts prefer insourcing are:

Long waiting lists and capacity pressure: Many trusts are under intense pressure from growing patient wait lists and unmet demand for diagnostics or elective care. With insourcing, they can use spare theatre and clinic capacity during evenings or weekends to service more patients on-site.
Better resource utilisation: Underused resources like theatres, diagnostic suites, or clinics can be used by external teams to make better use of the trust’s infrastructure to provide core patient services.
Oversight and continuity of service: Services remain on trust premises, under the purview of the NHS body, so that control over pathways, governance, and records continues to adhere to NHS England’s guidance.
Cost-effective: Compared to agency staffing and external providers, commissioning services allows trusts to save money while using their own unused estate and extend services beyond regular hours.

The staffing partners support NHS trusts with insourcing services with highly trained medical staff for a wide variety of medical and clinical services.

How Staffing Partners Support NHS Insourcing Services

By providing vetted and skilled external healthcare professionals during evenings, weekends, or out-of-office hours, staffing partners support NHS insourcing services in the following ways:

Improve planning and engagement

Patients can get continuity of care with planned in-source staffing. Communication between departments continues to remain seamless. NHS trusts can scale rapidly in a short time with an insourced workforce.

Reduce backlog

By instantly expanding the medical team availability, staffing partners help trusts tackle their long waiting lists and backlog to achieve important targets like Referral to Treatment (RTT) benchmarks.

Provide specialised staff

Highly skilled and pre-vetted medical staff in a wide range of specialities can be placed in NHS trusts needing insourcing services. They can work in diagnostics, allied health professions (AHPs), and elective surgeries.

Optimise usage of existing facilities

The insourcing staffing partners make full use of the existing NHS infrastructure during underutilised times. It maximises the asset efficiency of NHS trusts without additional facilities or handling the logistics of moving patients.

Support operational control

NHS trusts retain the full operational command and oversight of clinical governance and patient safety when they use the services of insourced staffing partners.

Save money long-term

Consistently using insourcing staffing services provides NHS trusts with a more planned and sustained workforce solution. This avoids the need to hire expensive last-minute agency staff or use full outsourcing.

Stay compliant

Many staffing partners work through approved NHS frameworks, like the NHS Workforce Alliance or HealthTrust Europe (HTE). This ensures compliance with national standards and price caps.

While insourcing is a natural and affordable choice, outsourcing still has value when NHS trusts suddenly need external support.

When Outsourcing Still Has a Role

Even though outsourcing healthcare to third parties comes with risks for NHS trusts, it’s still needed in the following conditions:

Insufficient in-house capacity during major theatre bottlenecks
Sudden need for specialised infrastructure, which otherwise can be expensive for NHS trusts
Unexpected demand spikes, like seasonal demand or pandemic backlog, where insourcing staff may not be sufficient
Need for temporary third-party support until long-term plans are developed

Outsourcing carries high risk, and complex clinical care can become problematic, with less NHS control. That’s why insourcing is automatically preferred, while outsourcing is only used when in-house options are constrained.

NHS Insourcing Services by Secure Healthcare Solutions

NHS trusts looking for ways to unlock extra capacity can make use of NHS Insourcing Services in Wolverhampton, offered by Secure HealthCare Solutions.

Our framework-compliant service model provides full-fledged clinical teams with pre-vetted staff. We deliver care within the premises of the NHS trust using existing equipment and estate. So, this can be an ideal solution to manage an increase in demand while ensuring compliant patient care.

The NHS is under constant pressure to cut waiting times while keeping care safe and accessible. Hospitals across the UK are looking for practical ways to make better use of their theatres, clinics, and diagnostic units.

One approach gaining attention is insourcing, where external clinical teams run extra sessions inside NHS facilities. This allows trusts to treat more patients without moving them to private hospitals.

In this blog, we will cover what insourcing is in the NHS, how it works, its benefits, and compare it with outsourcing.

What Is Insourcing in the NHS?

Insourcing in the NHS refers to bringing external clinical teams into NHS hospitals to deliver care using the trust’s facilities and equipment. Instead of sending patients to another site, the service takes place inside the hospital, often during evenings or weekends when theatres and clinics would otherwise sit idle.

This approach is different from hiring extra locum doctors or outsourcing patients to private hospitals. In insourcing, the provider supplies a complete clinical team, including consultants, nurses, and support staff, who work alongside existing NHS staff. The trust keeps control of governance, records, and patient pathways.

The main purpose is to boost capacity without building new wards or transferring patients elsewhere. It gives trusts a way to reduce waiting lists quickly, while still keeping treatment under NHS oversight. Because services are delivered on familiar sites, patients also benefit from continuity and a smoother care experience.

How the NHS Insourcing Framework Works

The NHS insourcing framework is a formal route that trusts use to buy insourcing services safely and quickly. Approved providers are listed on national frameworks such as NHS Shared Business Services, Crown Commercial Service, and the NHS Workforce Alliance.

These frameworks are built to make procurement straightforward. They pre-check suppliers for quality, compliance, and pricing so that trusts do not need to run a lengthy tender process. Once a provider is chosen, the trust can set up a contract through a call-off agreement.

This process ensures that insourcing projects follow NHS standards, keep patient safety at the centre, and allow services to begin without unnecessary delay. It gives trusts confidence that the extra capacity brought in will meet regulatory and clinical requirements.

Benefits of Insourcing in Healthcare for NHS Trusts

Faster reduction in waiting lists: Insourcing teams can run extra sessions during evenings or weekends, helping trusts treat more patients without needing new buildings or long-term hires.
Better use of hospital facilities: Clinics, theatres, and diagnostic units that would otherwise be unused outside normal hours are kept active, giving hospitals maximum value from their estate.
Continuity of care: Because treatment happens inside NHS hospitals, patients stay on familiar sites and records remain within the trust’s systems, avoiding the disruption that comes with outsourcing.
Improved patient experience: Patients do not need to travel to private hospitals or external providers, which reduces stress and supports smoother follow-up care.
Cost-effective option: By using the trust’s existing infrastructure and equipment, insourcing can often provide additional capacity at a lower cost compared with sending patients off-site.
Supports RTT performance: Extra capacity helps trusts meet referral-to-treatment targets and demonstrate progress against national standards.

Common Specialities Where Insourcing Is Used

Endoscopy

Endoscopy is one of the most common areas for insourcing. Trusts often face long waits for diagnostic scopes, which can delay treatment across several conditions. By bringing in full endoscopy teams during weekends, hospitals can clear backlogs faster while using their own suites and equipment.

Ophthalmology

Demand for cataract and other eye procedures continues to rise. Insourced ophthalmology services allow NHS hospitals to run additional theatre lists, giving patients quicker access to surgery without the need to travel to private providers.

Diagnostic Imaging

MRI, CT, and ultrasound scans are frequently outsourced, but insourcing offers an alternative that keeps imaging on site. Extra radiographers and reporting clinicians can be scheduled during off-peak hours, ensuring results stay within trust systems.

Surgical Specialties

General surgery: Helps reduce delays for hernia and gallbladder cases.
ENT: Insourced ENT clinics can ease pressure on routine referrals.
Gynaecology: Insourcing teams manage both outpatient and surgical pathways, supporting women’s health services.

Cardiology

Cardiology insourcing often focuses on diagnostic tests like echocardiograms and stress tests. This ensures patients receive timely investigations and treatment planning remains within the trust.

Other Uses

Insourcing has also supported dermatology, urology, and even some mental health services. The flexibility of the model allows trusts to target whichever speciality faces the heaviest backlog at a given time.

Insourcing vs Outsourcing: What’s Better for the NHS?

Aspect	Insourcing in the NHS	Outsourcing in the NHS
Location of Care	Services delivered inside NHS hospitals using existing facilities.	Patients sent to private hospitals or other external providers.
Control	Trust retains oversight of governance, patient pathways, and records.	Less direct control as patients move into another provider’s systems.
Patient Experience	Patients stay on familiar hospital sites, reducing disruption.	Patients often need to travel and adjust to new settings.
Use of Resources	Makes use of theatres and clinics during evenings or weekends.	Relies on external capacity, not on existing NHS estate.
Cost Impact	Can be cost-effective by using NHS infrastructure.	May be more expensive due to external provider rates.
Continuity of Care	Easier handover and follow-up as records remain in-house.	Communication gaps may occur across different systems.

How Secure Healthcare Solutions Delivers NHS Insourcing

At Secure Healthcare Solutions, we work closely with NHS trusts to give you quick access to full clinical teams through compliant insourcing frameworks. Our services are designed to fit around your hospital’s needs, whether that means running extra endoscopy lists, additional ophthalmology sessions, or diagnostic clinics during evenings and weekends. By choosing our teams, you keep services on your site, under your governance, and always focused on your patients.

We also create opportunities for clinicians who want to support the health service through NHS insourcing jobs. By joining our network, healthcare professionals can expand their experience, work flexibly, and help trusts reduce waiting lists across the country.

As your trusted insourcing healthcare agency in Wolverhampton, we are here to help you cut backlogs, improve patient flow, and make the most of your hospital’s capacity. If you are looking for a reliable partner to deliver insourcing, get in touch with us today.