A workforce plan for the NHS - massively increasing doctor and nurse training

Yesterday the government published a new Long Term NHS Workforce Plan - which includes the largest expansion in training and workforce in the NHS’s history, delivering on our priority to cut waiting lists.

  • NHS staff are at the heart of what makes our health service work, but as with other healthcare systems across the world, our NHS is facing significant challenges.
  • That is why the Conservative government is publishing our 15-year NHS Workforce Plan, setting out the largest expansion in training and workforce in the NHS’s history. In the coming years we will train twice the number of doctors and an extra 24,000 more nurses a year and we will do more to retain our brilliant NHS staff and reform the way the health system works to ensure it is fit for the future.
  • The plans which the government has announced today will secure the future of the NHS – training more nurses, more doctors and delivering shorter waiting times. Labour's only plan for the NHS is an unwanted, unfunded, top-down reorganisation that would cost billions and is opposed by doctors.
To be ruthlessly honest, governments of every political colour have failed to address this adequately for the last thirty years. The last Labour government even put a cap on the number of UK medical school training places, of 4,500 places each year - which was left in place for far too long. Jeremy Hunt commissioned five new medical schools and increased the cap to 6,000 and Sajid Javid increased it again. 

This week's further increase finally gets us to towards training the sort of number of medical professionals which Britain should actually have been training for the last three decades. 

However, as it takes at the very least fifteen years, and usually more like two decades or longer, before a first year medical student becomes a consultant, it will take decades to resolve the shortage of medical professionals which decades of short-termism from not just politicians of all parties but parts of the medical establishment and unions (The BMA voted by a narrow margin to support capping doctor training numbers in 2008.)

I see that the Labour party has been claiming (falsely) that the government have copied their ideas for the workforce plan: in fact the plan was produce by the NHS and the government is adopting it and funding it. This is an extremely important long-term investment in the future of healthcare in the UK.




 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nick Herbert on his visit to flood hit areas of Cumbria

Please note that the post below was published more than ten year ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by the
Read more

Quotes of the day 19th August 2020

Image
"Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise."  ( Cato the Elder , who lived 234 BC - 149 BC, quoted in "Lives" by Plutarch.) There is a similar saying by Germany's Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck: Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have put the same saying in a more humorous form: "Wise men profit by the mistakes of others, while fools will not learn even from their own blunders." See also this thread on the "Quote Investigator" website . Let us all be wise and learn from the events of the last few days.
Read more

Quote of the day 24th July 2020

Image
I was moved to put the passage below forward as a quote today when I saw a horrible post on twitter from someone writing that it was "excellent" that someone who took a different view from her about Brexit had died. I won't write which way round it was so that all the Remain supporters can assume the post was from a Brexit fanatic welcoming the death of a remainer and all the Leavers can assume it was a Remainiac welcoming one less Brexiteer. There's been plenty of nasty stuff on both sides but if you catch anyone of your own viewpoint  posting something like that who might listen to you, please do call them out on it - and point out that they're giving everyone on your side of the argument a bad name. Anyway, here's the quote from John Donne.
Read more