Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many people are training to become (a) doctors and (b) nurses in the UK.

Health Education England estimates that in the 2021/22 academic year there are over 72,000 student nurses in training in England.

In the 2019/20 academic year there were 45,605 undergraduate medical students in the United Kingdom, of which 32,745 were training in England, according to data provided to the General Medical Council (GMC) by the Higher Education Statistics Agency.

Student medics register with GMC when they begin their course, because of that there are more accurate numbers available for the numbers training to be doctors.

These figures include anyone at any point in their degree. Nursing degrees are usually three years, medical degrees four to six years.