Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what short-term steps his Department is taking to tackle the shortage of consultants.

The most recent NHS Digital workforce statistics (for October 2017) show the number of consultants working in the National Health Service has increased by 28% since May 2010, with numbers at record levels.

The Government currently funds over 6,000 medical school places in England each year. In addition, the Government has also committed to funding 1,500 more medical school places from 2019 at medical schools in England for domestic students to ensure we can train more doctors to meet the future need of our citizens as part of the historic medical expansion.

‘Facing the Facts – Shaping the Future – a draft health and care workforce strategy for England to 2027’ sets out actions being taken to ensure sufficient supply of doctors across all grades and specialties. This includes working with a range of Royal Colleges and provider organisations to identify and support senior medical staff recruitment from European Economic Area (EEA) and non-EEA countries, and reforming postgraduate medical education to better support the development of the doctors of tomorrow.

NHS Improvement provides Health Education England with support which includes looking at geographical variations in the number of doctors per head of population and correlating this to outcomes for selected specialties, and more efficient utilisation of consultants through e-rostering and job planning.

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