NHS: Staff Numbers Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department of Health and Social Care
Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall
Main Page: Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Labour - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(8 months, 1 week ago)
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Lord Markham (Con)
In every area, anaesthetists being a very good example, we need to be looking at where the bottlenecks are and moving to free up those situations. I think we would all agree that with practitioners such as anaesthetists and in other areas, it is a very sensible approach to make sure that the most highly skilled are focused on the most highly skilled jobs and that they can have people underneath them who can be trained to work within that. So hearing that there is a certain amount of opposition from certain colleges and the BMA to those sorts of roles is quite disappointing. I hope they would accept that this is a key way of addressing the issue.
Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Lab)
My Lords, can I take the Minister back to the original Question from my noble friend Lord Clark? He put before the House some quite startling statistics about the number of medical staff—particularly but not exclusively doctors —who are leaving following or shortly after the completion of their training, either for other countries or for private practice? What view does he take of that drain away from the National Health Service and the effective loss of the investment that the country makes in the very expensive training of clinicians?
Lord Markham (Con)
My first point on that is to ask what the real facts are. Five years on from qualification, around 95% of doctors are still registered with the General Medical Council and still practising in the UK. So the fact is that retention is very high. That notwithstanding, we want to do everything that we can to retain people, and professional development is what the long-term workforce plan is all about. Also, we all know that pensions were a big reason for a lot of the brain drain and doctors leaving the profession, and that was something we were quite radical in supporting and changing. We are going through this bit by bit, asking what key things we need to do to retain our staff and resolve this.