Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what estimate his Department has made of how many new GPs will be trained and employed in the NHS by 2020.
The Government has a commitment to provide an additional 5,000 doctors working in general practice by 2020. In order to achieve this, there will be increasing general practitioner (GP) training recruitment, a major national and international recruitment campaign, bursaries and post-certificate of completion of training fellowships in hard to recruit areas, and GPs will be encouraged to return to general practice.
Health Education England recruited 3,019 new starters to training posts in 2016 - the highest number of GP trainees ever.