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 improve NHS workforce capacity to meet (a) current demand and (b) future patient need.

We continue to grow the National Health Service workforce. As of February 2023, there were over 5,300 (4.2%) more doctors and almost 12,300 (3.9%) more nurses than the same time last year. We are on track to deliver 50,000 more nurses across the NHS by 2024 and have almost 43,000 more nurses in February 2023 compared with September 2019.

The Government has funded an additional 1,500 undergraduate medical school places per year for domestic students in England, a 25% increase, taking the total number of medical school places in England to 7,500 each year.

In addition, the Government temporarily lifted the cap on medical school places for students who completed A-Levels in 2020 and in 2021 and who had an offer from a university in England to study standards of training medicine, subject to their grades. As a result of this change, the intakes for 2020/21 and 2021/22 were 8,405 and 8,460 respectively, significantly above the planned cap of 7,500.

To support the workforce as a whole we have commissioned NHS England to develop a long term workforce plan for the NHS workforce for the next 15 years. This plan will help ensure that we have the right numbers of staff, with the right skills to transform and deliver high quality services fit for the future.