Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent steps he has taking to increase the recruitment and retention of doctors.

The National Health Service Long Term Plan, published on 7 January 2019, sets out a vital strategic framework to ensure that over the next 10 years the NHS will have the staff it needs so that the NHS workforce has the time they need to care, working in a supportive culture that allows them to provide the expert compassionate care they are committed to providing.

My Rt. hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care has commissioned Baroness Dido Harding, Chair of NHS Improvement, working closely with Sir David Behan, Chair of Health Education, to oversee the delivery of a workforce implementation plan. This will include proposals to grow the workforce, consideration of additional staff and skills required, building a supportive working culture in the NHS and how to ensure first rate leadership for NHS staff.

The Government has committed to growing the general practitioner workforce by an additional 5,000 full-time equivalent doctors as soon as possible. The Department has started to roll out an extra 1,500 medical school places for domestic students, with the first 630 places taken up in September 2018. By 2020, five new medical schools will have opened to help deliver the expansion.

The Enhancing Junior Doctors’ Working Lives programme was established in 2016 by Health Education England (HEE) to address a range of issues that were impacting on doctors in training. The programme continues to be an important focus of HEE’s Medical Reform Programme.