Asked by: Alison McGovern (Labour - Wirral South)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many doctors were on the medical register in (a) December 2019 and (b) September 2022.
Answered by Will Quince
The Department does not hold this data centrally. The General Medical Council (GMC) is the independent regulator of all medical doctors practising in the United Kingdom which sets and enforces the standards all doctors must adhere to. The GMC is responsible for operational matters, including holding data on the number of doctors on the medical register, as well as the number of doctors who have revoked their status on the medical register.
Asked by: Alison McGovern (Labour - Wirral South)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many people were employed as health care workers in the NHS in (a) January and (b) June 2023.
Answered by Will Quince
Every month, NHS England publish data on staff working in the National Health Service Hospital and Community Health Services (HCHS) setting and staff working in the general practice (GP) setting in England.
The table below shows the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) staff in HCHS and GP settings in January 2023 and April 2023. June 2023 data is not yet available.
Setting Type January 2023 April 2023
HCHS 1,269,228 1,280,377
GP 143,012 143,948
Source: NHS Workforce Statistics
Monthly data timeseries for HCHS settings can be found at the following link: https://files.digital.nhs.uk/C1/85E8AA/NHS%20Workforce%20Statistics%2C%20April%202023%20England%20Provisional%20statistics.xlsx
Monthly data timeseries for GP settings can be found at the following link: https://files.digital.nhs.uk/FE/661126/GPW%20Bulletin%20Tables%20-%20May%202023.xlsx
Asked by: Alison McGovern (Labour - Wirral South)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many mental health workers were employed by the NHS in (a) January and (b) June 2023.
Answered by Will Quince
Every quarter, NHS England publish data on the National Health Service Hospital and Community Health Services (HCHS) mental health workforce. The data shows that as of March 2023 (the latest data), there were 142,754 full-time equivalent (FTE) staff in the mental health workforce working in the HCHS setting. In December 2022, there were 138,610 FTE staff in the mental health workforce
The definition of the HCHS mental health workforce includes those who are providing or supporting the provision of mental health services. Staff are included if they have either an NHS Occupation Code or Area of Work that is related to mental health services.
Asked by: Alison McGovern (Labour - Wirral South)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many GPs have left the NHS since June 2022.
Answered by Neil O'Brien
The table below shows the number of fully qualified general practitioners (GPs) who left the National Health Service between March 2022 and March 2023, the latest month for which the data is available:
| Full-time equivalent | Headcount |
Fully Qualified GPs (excludes GPs in Training Grade) | 2,407 | 3,681 |
While GPs leave the NHS, new doctors join general practice and there are 1,900 more than in 2019. Measures to refine pension tax will help to retain experienced GPs.
Notes:
- Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) refers to the proportion of full-time contracted hours that the post holder is contracted to work. 1 would indicate they work a full set of hours (37.5), 0.5 that they worked half time. In GPs in Training Grades’ contracts 1 FTE = 40 hours and in this table these FTEs have been converted to the standard wMDS measure of 1 FTE = 37.5 hours for consistency.
- Figures shown do not include staff working in prisons, army bases, educational establishments, specialist care centres including drug rehabilitation centres, walk-in centres and other alternative settings outside of traditional general practice such as urgent treatment centres and minor injury units.
- It is not recommended that comparisons be made between quarterly or monthly figures (e.g. Mar 2016 to Sept 2016) due to the unknown effect of seasonality on workforce numbers. Any such comparisons should therefore be treated with extreme caution.
- The data shows GPs who joined and/or left the cohort workforce between the beginning and end of each specified time period.
- A leaver is a GP whose identifying information was present in the relevant dataset at the beginning but not at the end of the specified time period.
- Please note that these figures do not capture GP migration between practices during this period.
- In addition, due to data quality, a GP recorded as a leaver in these figures may have left one practice and joined another practice with poor data completion. In instances such as this, a GP will be incorrectly recorded as a leaver due to the identifying information no longer being present in the dataset. Conversely, a GP could appear in the practice cohort as a joiner but may have joined from a practice with poor data completion rather than being a new addition to the GP workforce.
Asked by: Alison McGovern (Labour - Wirral South)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what the average waiting list time for specialist clinical (a) care and (b) surgery was in (a) February, (b) April and (c) June 2023.
Answered by Will Quince
This data is not available in the format requested. Average waiting times for referral to treatment for elective care were 14.5 weeks in February 2023, and 13.8 weeks in April 2023. These figures relate to the average time a patient is still waiting for their treatment to begin, at the end of the given month. Official NHS England figures for June 2023 have not yet been published.
Asked by: Alison McGovern (Labour - Wirral South)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many people have been on a waiting list for an appointment for (a) special care and (b) surgery treatments for more than one year.
Answered by Will Quince
This data is not available in the format requested.
Asked by: Alison McGovern (Labour - Wirral South)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department is taking steps to help support children whose mental health is affected by their financial circumstances.
Answered by Maria Caulfield - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Business and Trade) (Minister for Women)
We are increasing investment into mental health services by at least £2.3 billion a year by March 2024 and have set out our aim in the NHS Long Term Plan for an additional 345,000 children and young people, including those from low income families, to be able to get the mental health support they need.
We are making good progress in rolling out mental health support teams to schools and colleges across England. As of spring 2022 there were 287 in place in over 4,700 schools and colleges across the country, offering support to children experiencing anxiety, depression, and other common mental health issues. We expect this is now at around 399 teams covering 35% of pupils. Over 500 are planned to be up and running by 2024.
On top of this we provided an extra £500 million in 2021/22 to accelerate our NHS mental health expansion plans and target groups whose mental health has been most affected by the pandemic. This included £79 million to expand support in children and young people’s mental health services; and a £15 million Prevention and Promotion for Better Mental Health Fund to help level up mental health and wellbeing across the country by investing in activity to promote positive mental health in the 40 most deprived local authority areas in England.
More widely, we are working across government and with external partners to identify who is most vulnerable to the impacts of increased cost of living, and what action can be taken to support them. The Government announced a £37 billion package of cost of living support to help households and businesses, including a £15 billion targeted package of direct support for the most vulnerable households.
Asked by: Alison McGovern (Labour - Wirral South)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to (a) increase the speed of and (b) support children awaiting referral to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services.
Answered by Maria Caulfield - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Business and Trade) (Minister for Women)
We are increasing investment into mental health services by at least £2.3 billion a year by March 2024 and have set out our aim in the NHS Long Term Plan for an additional 345,000 children and young people to be able to get the mental health support they need by March 2024. We also provided an additional £79 million in 2021/22 to help speed up the expansion of children’s mental health services. This allowed around 22,500 more children and young people to access community health services, 2,000 more to access eating disorder services and a faster increase in the coverage of mental health support teams in schools and colleges.
NHS England has consulted on the potential to introduce five new waiting time standards as part of its clinically-led review of NHS access standards, including that children, young people and their families, presenting to community-based mental health services should start to receive care within four weeks from referral. As a first step, NHS England has shared and promoted guidance with its local system partners to consistently report waiting times to support the development of a baseline position. We are working with NHS England on on the next steps.
We are also making good progress in rolling out mental health support teams to schools and colleges across England. As of spring 2022 there were 287 in place in over 4,700 schools and colleges across the country, offering support to children experiencing anxiety, depression, and other common mental health issues, some of whom may be awaiting referral to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services. We expect this is now at around 400 teams covering 35% of pupils. Over 500 are planned to be up and running by 2024.
Asked by: Alison McGovern (Labour - Wirral South)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, pursuant to the Answer of 14 April 2023 on General Practitioners: Notice Boards, how many times his Department has been made aware that information on patient noticeboards is out of date since 2010.
Answered by Neil O'Brien
This information is not held centrally. The Department is not made aware of information on patient noticeboards that is out of date. As independent contractors, it is up to each individual general practice to check for out of date information and update patient noticeboards.
Asked by: Alison McGovern (Labour - Wirral South)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether a patient's GP Practice will be informed if that patient visits different hospitals in other NHS trusts in relation to similar illnesses or injuries.
Answered by Neil O'Brien
A patient’s general practice (GP) would usually be informed when they attended hospital, either via a discharge letter, or via a notification on an electronic patient record system. This is dependent on the National Health Service trust knowing the patient’s registered GP. A patient may object to the sharing of their information with their GP when visiting a trust, for example when attending accident and emergency, and the trust will need to follow data protection legislation and guidance to determine whether it is in best interests to still share this with the patient’s GP.