Refreshed NHS workforce plan to include ‘fewer staff than projected’

A ‘refreshed’ workforce plan for the NHS will include ‘fewer staff than projected’ by 2035, the Government has said.

In 10 years there will be fewer NHS staff than projected in the 2023 long-term workforce plan but those staff will be ‘more motivated’ and receive ‘better training’, it added.

The 10-year plan for the NHS published last week rejected the previous Government’s aim to increase NHS headcount by 60% by 2037 as unworkable.

And it criticised it for its projected 4% increase of fully-qualified GPs by 2036/37, compared to a 49% increase in hospital consultants.

At the end of last year, health secretary Wes Streeting announced plans to rework the current NHS workforce strategy, published in 2023, and committed to publishing a refreshed NHS Workforce Plan by this summer.

The Government said: ‘Later this year, we will publish a 10-Year Workforce Plan that takes a decidedly different approach.

‘Instead of asking “how many staff do we need to maintain our current care model over the next 10 years?”, it will ask “given our reform plan, what workforce do we need, what should they do, where should they be deployed and what skills should they have?”

‘While, by 2035, there will be fewer staff than projected in the 2023 long-term workforce plan, those staff will be better treated, more motivated, have better training and more scope to develop their careers.’

The 10-year plan also said that over the next three years, it will create 1,000 new specialty training posts ‘with a focus on specialties where there is greatest need’ and pledged to prioritise UK medical graduates and ‘doctors who have worked in the NHS for a significant period’ for specialty training.

The plan said the Government will ‘reorientate the focus of NHS recruitment away from its dependency on international recruitment, and towards its own communities – to ensure sustainability in an era of global healthcare workforce shortages;.

‘It is our ambition to reduce international recruitment to less than 10% by 2035,’ it added.

It comes after the BMA backed a proposal to prioritise UK medical school graduates over international medical graduates (IMGs) for training posts at their national conference last month. 

And NHS England is currently conducting a ‘significant’ review of all postgraduate medical training, including GP programmes, following concerns that 20,000 doctors are expected to miss out on a training place this year due to the ‘mismatch’ in the number of formal training places and the number of applicants.

Responding to the plans, BMA council chair Dr Tom Dolphin said: ‘It’s good to see the Government pledging in writing to give UK medical graduates and those who have worked for some time in the NHS priority for roles, something the BMA has lobbied long and hard for.’

But he warned the 1,000 new places ‘won’t touch the sides of what’s needed to tackle un- and underemployment once and for all’.

The 10-year plan condemned ‘the fiction that we can recruit endlessly more staff’, highlighting an Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) estimate that ‘every single working age adult would be working in health and social care’ by 2100.

It proposed ending the NHS’ ‘dependency on international recruitment’ by capping new overseas recruit numbers at 10% by 2035 to create a more ‘sustainable’ workforce.

It said ‘it will neither be possible nor ethical’ to continue similar levels of international recruitment, and a more sustainable plan ‘will involve NHS employers reaching into their communities – rather than looking to international recruitment agencies’. 

The King’s Fund’s chief executive Sarah Woolnough said: ‘The plan rightly states an ambition for a more sustainable workforce, focusing on retention and a pipeline for future staff, and aims to look at the general staffing mix rather than simply at numbers.  

‘The Government is placing a large bet on technology and automation freeing up enough clinician time so that fewer frontline staff will be needed in the future. If that bet doesn’t pay off the NHS could face an even larger staffing crisis.’ 

In 2023, Pulse’s award-winning investigation looked at the long-term workforce plan in full to understand whether it would solve any issues in general practice.

Read all of Pulse’s coverage of the 10-year plan here.