NHS England workforce plan ‘needs many thousands more family doctors’

The NHS’s landmark plan to tackle understaffing will recruit just one GP for every 24 hospital consultants, experts have warned, leaving England needing thousands more family doctors.

The Royal College of GPs has written to Wes Streeting protesting against what it says is a stark imbalance that threatens one of the government’s key NHS goals.

In her letter, the college chair, Prof Kamila Hawthorne, told the health secretary that the “paltry” number of additional family doctors NHS England aims to recruit through its long-term workforce plan would be too few to fulfil his pledge of increasing out-of-hospital care.

When the plan was published last year it was widely lauded for laying out a strategy to double the number of homegrown doctors and almost double the supply of homegrown nurses by 2031.

Under the plan the number of consultants is due to go up by 49% from 54,800 to 81,600 by 2037/38 – a rise of 26,800, National Audit Office analysis shows. But the number of fully qualified GPs is due to increase by just 4% from 27,800 in 2021 to 28,900.

Patients’ long waits to see a GP will persist, despite Labour’s promise to end them, unless the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) urgently revises the plan to ensure it produces far more GPs, Hawthorne said.

“We desperately need many thousands more of us delivering patient care on the frontline of the NHS. This is why we’re so concerned about current projections within the NHS long-term workforce plan which show a paltry rise in the number of full-time, fully qualified GPs over the next 10 to 12 years, especially when compared with hospital doctors.

“We absolutely need more doctors across the board. But the new government has made clear its ambitions to move more care out of hospitals and into the community.

“So it makes no sense for numbers of qualified GPs to stagnate while numbers of hospital consultants rise significantly.”

The letter, signed by 9,657 GPs, tells Streeting that unless he revises the plan to produce a closer to equal number of hospital medics and GPs, “this would leave already chronically understaffed general practices woefully unprepared to meet the growing needs of patients.”

There is growing concern among other staff groups that the workforce plan will not deliver the intended huge boost to the domestic supply of health personnel.

Last week, the Royal College of Nursing warned that applications to do nursing degrees have “collapsed” by 27% over the last three years. Such a big fall raises the possibility that the plan’s goal of a 92% rise in the number of nursing students by 2031/32 may not be reached.

The college has urged ministers to offer greater financial incentives to reverse the trend, including the gradual write-off of student loans, so the plan does not “fall further and irredeemably off target”.

The previous government was accused in February of scaling back the plan to double the number of graduates coming out of medical schools from 7,500 to 15,000 by 2031 after cutting back the number of extra places being created for admission in 2025/26 to just 350 – fewer than a quarter of what medical schools and doctors’ groups believe is needed to ensure doubling occurs.

A DHSC spokesperson said: “Training and retaining talented NHS staff is absolutely central to our mission of building a health service that is fit for the future.

“This government is committed to cutting the red tape that ties up GPs time and bringing back the family doctor, so patients can easily book appointments with their regular GP. We will train thousands more GPs and shift the focus of healthcare out of hospitals and into the community.”