Health secretary Wes Streeting has committed to a ‘refreshed’ NHS workforce plan next summer which will have a ‘laser-focus’ on boosting GP numbers.
Over the weekend, Mr Streeting announced plans to rework the current NHS workforce strategy, published in 2023, which aims to increase GP training places by 50% to 6,000 by 2031.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) highlighted yesterday, however, that the plan would only increase the number of fully-qualified GPs by 4% by 2036/37, compared to a 49% increase in hospital consultants.
This disparity has been raised by the RCGP, who wrote to the health secretary in July – along with 10,000 GP signatories – to demand an urgent review of general practice workforce plans.
DHSC has said that the revised workforce plan for England will be unveiled next summer, after publication of the 10-year plan for health, which is due in the spring.
Mr Streeting pointed to Lord Darzi’s review which in September ‘diagnosed the dire state of the NHS’ and found that ‘too many people end up in hospital, because there aren’t the resources in the community to reach patients earlier’.
He continued: ‘Our 10 Year Health Plan will deliver three big shifts in the focus of healthcare from hospital to community, analogue to digital, and sickness to prevention.
‘We will refresh the NHS workforce plan to fit the transformed health service we will build over the next decade, so the NHS has the staff it needs to treat patients on time again.’
DHSC said that ‘too much care is being delivered in hospitals because of historic underinvestment in the community’, and highlighted that there are almost 16% fewer fully qualified GPs in the UK than other high income countries, relative to the population.
‘The Government and NHS will unveil a refreshed Workforce Plan in the summer with a laser-focus on shifting care from hospitals and into the community, as we work to get the NHS back on its feet and fit for the future,’ a statement from DHSC said.
The department also laid out data showing that:
- The number of nurses working in the community fell by at least 5%, between 2009 and 2023;
- There has been a reduction of nearly 20% in the number of health visitors between 2019 and 2023;
- The number of mental health nurses has just returned to its 2010 level.
DHSC also claimed that patients ‘end up in A&E’ because they ‘can’t get the care they need in the community’, such as GP appointments.
NHS England chief executive Amanda Pritchard said that they had already ‘committed to update the plan regularly so that it reflects the changing and growing needs of patients’.
She added: ‘While the NHS is delivering more care to patients in the community, with the expansion of virtual wards, community diagnostic centres and neighbourhood hubs, part of our longer term goal is delivering even more care out of hospitals, and we’ll work closely with the government to refresh the workforce plan, alongside the upcoming 10 Year Health Plan.’
In March this year, the public spending watchdog revealed that the workforce plan’s ambitions were based on ‘significant’ substitution of fully qualified GPs with trainees and SAS doctors.
It found that NHSE’s modelling of the future workforce has ‘significant weaknesses’ and that some of its ‘assumptions’ may have been ‘optimistic’.
A version of this story was first published on our sister title Pulse.
