Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of the potential impact of the number of clinical radiology staff trainee places on the demand for clinical diagnostic services in the last 12 months.

There are 75 more doctors in clinical radiology specialty training programmes in 2023 compared to 2022. The following table sets out the number of doctors the General Medical Council (GMC) have recorded as being on clinical radiology specialty training programmes in England from 2012 to 2023, showing a year-on-year increase:

Source: GMC National Trainee Survey data. Accessed via GMC Data Explorer, Postgraduate data, available at the following link: data.gmc-uk.org/gmcdata/home/#/reports/Postgraduate training/Stats/report.

Successful completion of the clinical radiology training programme allows doctors to join the GMC specialist register.

In addition to this, the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan (LTWP) sets out how we will meet the workforce challenges of the future through increasing recruitment, including doubling medical school training places and increasing allied health professional training places by a quarter by 2031/32. The LTWP also sets a path to ensure up to 130,000 fewer staff leave the National Health Service by improving culture, leadership, and wellbeing. In addition to retention measures, we will reform and modernise the way staff work, harness new technology and increase productivity to ensure staff can spend more time with patients. This will apply to all NHS staff groups, including radiologists.