Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the implications for his policies of the WHO guideline on health workforce development, attraction, recruitment and retention in rural and remote areas.

The Government welcomes the World Health Organization’s guideline on health workforce attraction, recruitment and retention in rural areas and is committed to ensuring there is a sufficient workforce supply across all geographies of England.

Five new medical schools have opened in hard-to-recruit areas, including rural and coastal locations in Sunderland, Lancashire, Chelmsford, Lincoln and Canterbury. To further attract trainees to remote geographies, foundation priority programmes were introduced in 2019 allowing applicants to rank their preference for selected priority programmes and be offered places prior to national allocation. The NHS People Plan has a key focus on retention. National Health Service organisations locally should shape their workforce plans to meet local workforce challenges focusing on both recruitment and retention to increase overall supply.