The Tories could be forced to reveal the true extent of NHS staff shortages in a legal amendment being debated today.
More than 100 health and care organisations have called for a new legal requirement for the NHS to commission independent assessments of staff numbers needed to cater for patient demand.
However the Government previously ordered Conservative MPs to vote against the amendment to the Health and Care Bill.
The legal requirement should get a second chance to be added to the bill on Thursday and is scheduled to be debated in the House of Lords.
Andrew Goddard, president of the Royal College of Physicians, said: “I have dedicated my career to working in the NHS, a service that I am fiercely proud of, and yet it scares me to wonder what might happen should I need care as I get older.
“There simply aren’t enough doctors to go round, not least within geriatrics.
“The workforce crisis we’re facing is largely down to an astonishing lack of planning.
“All successful organisations rely on long-term workforce planning to meet demand and it’s absurd that we don’t do this for the NHS and social care system. The Government needs to accept the amendment and make workforce planning a priority.”
The NHS in England has a record number of advertised vacancies of around 100,000.
NHS staff and bed numbers per 100,000 of the UK population are known to be some of the lowest when compared to other developed nations.
The Office for National Statistics forecasts that our ageing population means there will be more than 17 million over 65s in the UK by 2040.
Yet there is no independent public assessment of how many NHS and social care staff will be needed to meet that demand.
There are a record 6.1 million people on the NHS waiting list in England but no official published analysis on how many of which staff will be needed to clear the backlog.
The amendment has cross-party support including from ex-Tory Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, ex-NHS England boss Lord Simon Stevens and Tory Peer Baroness Dido Harding.
Sir Simon Stevens has labelled the Government’s refusal to create a duty to publish NHS workforce data as “flying blind”.
Baroness Harding, as then-chair of NHS Improvement, was commissioned in 2018 by the Department of Health and Social Care to develop an NHS People Plan.
“It did not contain any forecasts of workforce numbers,” she previously explained.
“Why was this? It was not because the work was not done. It was. And not even because the Government disagreed with the numbers.
“There are no forecasts because we could not get approval to publish the document with any forecasts in it.
“My experience is clear. Unless expressly required to do so, Government will not be honest about the mismatch between the supply and demand of healthcare workers.”
The #StrengthInNumbers campaign to get the amendment included in the upcoming Health and Care Bill comes after Tory MPs voted against it in the House of Commons in November 2021.
The amendment has been re-tabled by Baroness Cumberlege with support from Labour and the Liberal Democrats.
The Royal College of Physicians estimates that 48% of consultant posts went unfilled in 2020, mostly due to a lack of applicants.
There are 39,813 ‘full time equivalent’ registered nurse vacancies in the NHS in England, a vacancy rate of 10.5%. Skills for Care estimates that 6.8% of roles in adult social care were vacant in 2020/21 with the number of filled posts falling for the first time since March 2021.
The British Medical Association estimates the UK is 50,000 doctors short compared with the average in other OECD nations.
The Government has previously repeated the line that it has "record numbers" of people working in the NHS.
