Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan will include plans to increase the number of rheumatology (a) consultants and (b) clinical nurse specialists.

To support the workforce as a whole, we have commissioned NHS England to develop a Long Term Workforce Plan for the National Health Service 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.

We continue to grow the NHS workforce and as of March 2023 there has been an increase of over 12,900 more nurses and over 5,400 more doctors since the previous year.   We are on target to meet the 50,000 nurses’ commitment, with over 44,000 more nurses in March 2023 than there were in September 2019.

As of February 2023, there are 695 full-time equivalent consultants working in the rheumatology specialism in NHS trusts and commissioning bodies in England. This is an increase of 20 since last year. We do not hold data on clinical nurse specialists.