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 ensure a sufficient number of specialist trainees and consultants in geriatric medicine to deliver good patient outcomes.

Nationally, there has been a 35% increase of consultants in geriatric medicine since May 2010.

As set out in ‘Facing the Facts, Shaping the Future: A draft health and care workforce strategy for England to 2027’, Health Education England is working with Royal Colleges, arm’s length bodies and others, to determine the numbers required for medical specialty training to produce the consultants and general practitioners of the future.

Locally, responsibility for staffing levels, including the number of consultant posts, rests with individual National Health Service trusts and their boards who are best placed to decide how many staff they need to provide a given service.