Thousands more doctors and nurses will be trained in England every year as part of a government push to plug the huge workforce gaps that plague almost all NHS services.
The number of places in medical schools will rise from 7,500 to 10,000 by 2028 and could reach 15,000 by 2031 as a result of the NHS’s first long-term workforce plan.
There will also be a big expansion in training places for those who want to become nurses, with the number rising by a third to 40,000 by 2028 – matching the number of nurses the health service currently lacks.
Amanda Pritchard, the chief executive of NHS England, hailed the long-awaited plan as “a once in a generation opportunity to put staffing on a sustainable footing for years to come”.
She and Rishi Sunak will launch the plan on Friday at a joint press conference in Downing Street. They will give more details about the increase in NHS staffing intended to banish the service’s chronic lack of frontline personnel, its heavy use of agency staff and the increasing reliance on foreign workers.
Ministers first pledged in 2017 to publish a long-term strategy to tackle understaffing. It will finally reach the public domain five days before the NHS celebrates its 75th birthday on Wednesday.
It shows that “this government is making the largest single expansion in NHS eduction and training in its history”, the prime minister said. The NHS will receive £2.4bn in extra funding over the next five years to pay for the planned increase in health professionals, which will also include the training of many more dentists, midwives and physiotherapists.
Medical groups, health experts and organisations representing NHS staff welcomed the plan as ambitious but overdue. Richard Murray, chief executive of the King’s Fund thinktank, said it could be a “landmark moment” for the health service by providing it with the staff it needs to provide proper care.
However, doubts about how soon the expansion will kick in arose when it emerged that medical schools will not start admitting the extra students until September 2025. The Department of Health and Social Care did not respond to a request to clarify when universities would begin educating the promised 10,000 extra would-be nurses a year.
Dr Jennifer Dixon, the chief executive of the Health Foundation, welcomed the NHS’s commitment to updating every two years its assessment of how many staff it needs, and of what type, to meet future care needs. But she urged ministers to legislate to ensure that that pledge is fulfilled.
Labour accused the government of stealing its longstanding policy to ramp up NHS staffing, published last year.
“The Conservatives have finally admitted they have no ideas of their own, so are adopting Labour’s plan to train the doctors and nurses the NHS needs”, said Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary.
“They should have done this a decade ago. Then the NHS would have enough staff today.” The government’s strategy “will take years to have an impact”, he added.
Official NHS figures show that the number of vacancies in the service in England have almost quadrupled from the 21,351 seen in March 2010 to the 112,498 recorded at the last count. That included 8,549 doctors and 40,096 nurses.
NHS bosses have in recent years described how a lack of staff has overtaken financial problems as their greatest worry as and the greatest threat to quality of patient care and the NHS’s future. Below-inflation pay increases and the pressures of working in an overstretched health service have prompted growing numbers of health professionals to quit soon after embarking on their careers or retire early as a result of becoming burnt out.
Experts also questioned when the promised £2.4bn would become available and if future governments would continue to provide it after 2028.
“We haven’t yet seen the detail of how this funding will be phased, and whether it will be sustained over many years,” said Murray. One senior NHS figure said: “This money is vital to the plan delivering. But there are still so many unanswered questions about it.”
The more ambitious targets – increasing the number of doctors and nurses to 15,000 a year and 54,000 a year respectively – are not due to be met until 2031.
Dr Billy Palmer, a workforce expert at the Nuffield Trust thinktank, said that although “the huge increase in trainees will mean less risk of shortages in the long term”, it could prove to be “a costly gamble” unless working conditions in the NHS were improved to stem the loss of staff.
The plan is also expected to set out measures that will help the NHS retain 130,000 staff members who would otherwise leave. But NHS England gave few details of what that would involve when trailing the plan ahead of its unveiling on Friday.
