Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department has a workforce strategy to tackle cardiovascular care in the NHS.

NHS England and NHS Improvement’s Cardiac Pathway Improvement Programme was launched this year and includes a workstream for workforce optimisation and innovation. The objectives for this workstream include ensuring education and training packages are in place, promoting the use of digital passporting for staff to enable working in trusts across health care systems and e-rostering and e-job planning across trusts and networks.

There are currently 3,469 hospital and community health service doctors working in cardiology in the National Health Service. This is an increase of 397 or 12.9% since July 2019. This includes 1,493 consultants, or an increase of 8.6% since July 2019.