Britain could double the number of doctors and nurses it trains under NHS plans to tackle a deepening staffing crisis, according to reports.
The proposal to increase the number of places in UK medical schools from 7,500 to 15,000 is contained in a draft of NHS England’s long-awaited workforce plan, which is expected to be published next month.
Labour has already announced this policy as a key element of its plans to revive the NHS. However, it could face opposition from the Treasury because of how much it would cost, according to the Times, which reported on the plan.
Opposition parties, medical organisations and NHS staff unions have been arguing for years that the government must take radical action to address the service’s growing lack of staff across the UK. The NHS in England alone is short of 133,000 staff – equating to about a tenth of its workforce – including 47,000 nurses and 9,000 doctors, according to the most recent official figures.
There are also shortages of midwives, paramedics and operating theatre staff. Staff groups say routine gaps in NHS care providers’ rotas are endangering patients’ safety, increasing workload and costing the service money. The NHS in England spends £6.2bn a year paying temporary staff, including from agencies, to cover shifts.
Some hospitals are paying staffing agencies as much as £5,200 for a doctor to cover a single shift, and the NHS has spent £4.6bn in the last five years on agency doctors, Labour recently revealed.
Successive governments since 2017 have promised to produce a detailed plan to give the health service the staff it needs. However, neither the “NHS people plan” that NHS England published in July 2020, nor its interim predecessor, included plans for specific increases in staff numbers, which sources said was because the Treasury would not provide the money to cover the costs involved.
Labour plans to double the number of medical school training places, train 10,000 more nurses and midwives a year, double the number of district nurses who join the NHS, and train 5,000 more health visitors, all paid for by abolishing non-domiciliary tax status.
Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, will play a key role in deciding whether the increase in homegrown staff that NHS England believes is necessary will go ahead.
When Hunt was health secretary, he increased the number of medical school places from 6,000 to 7,500 and oversaw the creation of five new medical schools in England. During his tenure as chair of the Commons health and social care select committee, it produced a report last July warning that the NHS was facing “the greatest workforce crisis in history”.
In his autumn statement as chancellor last November, Hunt pledged that ministers would bring forward a detailed NHS workforce plan, including independent estimates of the number of doctors and nurses the service needed.
The Medical Schools Council, which represents the UK’s 45 medical schools, has said Britain should expand the number of training places by 5,000. Many thousands of bright A-level students are denied the chance to study medicine every year because of the limited number of places available.
Responding to the Times report, Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, said: “The NHS backs Labour’s plan to double medical school places. Why doesn’t the government?”
