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 doctors training to become rheumatologists.

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.

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. This expansion was completed in September 2020 and delivered five new medical schools in England. This will help ensure a larger potential pipeline for rheumatology trainees in coming years.

In January 2023 Health Education England announced that nearly 900 additional medical specialty training posts have been created for this year.

As of February 2023, there were 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.