Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to increase the number of trained interventional radiologists in the NHS.

As of October 2022, there were 1,588 full-time equivalent doctors in training in the clinical radiology specialty in the National Health Service in England. This is an increase of 252, 18.9%, since 2019.

The Government funded an additional 20 Specialty Training year six (ST6) places for interventional radiologists in 2021/22 and 2022/23. These increases in the overall radiology workforce will increase the number of radiologists who can train to deliver interventional radiology and expand national capacity for the paediatric interventional radiology workforce.

To support the workforce as a whole, we have commissioned NHS England to develop a Long Term Workforce Plan, which will include independently verified forecasts for the number of healthcare professionals required in future years. The Plan is for the whole of the NHS workforce, it will not provide detailed workforce assessments for individual services.