NHS England staffing plan ‘still needs thousands of GPs’

Experts warn that the NHS’s ground-breaking plan to tackle staff shortages will leave it with just one GP for every 24 hospital consultants, leaving England needing thousands more GPs.

The Royal College of GPs has written to Wes Streeting to protest at what it calls a glaring imbalance that threatens one of the government’s key NHS goals.

In her letter, the chair of the college, Prof Kamila Hawthorne, wrote to the Health Secretary that the “meagre” number of additional GPs NHS England plans to recruit through its long-term workforce plan would be too few to deliver on its promise to expand out-of-hospital care.

When the plan was published last year, it was widely praised for setting out a strategy to double the number of local doctors and almost double the supply of local nurses by 2031.

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

Despite Labour’s pledge to end this, patients will still face long waits to see a GP unless the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) urgently reviews the plan to ensure many more GPs are appointed, Hawthorne said.

“We urgently need thousands more of us delivering patient care on the frontline of the NHS. That is why we are so concerned about the current projections within the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan, which show a meagre increase in the number of full-time, fully qualified GPs over the next 10 to 12 years, especially compared to hospital doctors.

“We absolutely need more doctors on all fronts, but the new government has made it clear that it wants to take more care out of hospitals and into the community.

“It is therefore not logical that the number of qualified general practitioners is stagnating while the number of hospital consultants is increasing sharply.”

The letter, signed by 9,657 GPs, says that if he does not revise the plan to train equal numbers of hospital doctors and GPs, “this will leave chronically understaffed GP practices woefully unprepared to meet the growing needs of patients.”

There is growing concern among other staff groups that the staffing plan will not provide the intended huge boost to the domestic supply of healthcare workers.

Last week the Royal College of Nursing warned that applications for nursing courses have “collapsed” by 27% over the past three years. Such a large decline increases the likelihood that the plan’s target of a 92% increase in the number of nursing students by 2031/32 will not be met.

The board has called on ministers to provide greater financial incentives to reverse the trend, including the gradual write-off of student loans, so that the plan does not “drift further and irreparably off course”.

The previous government was accused in February of backtracking on plans to double the number of medical school graduates from 7,500 to 15,000 by 2031, after cutting the number of extra places created for admission in 2025/26 to just 350. That is less than a quarter of what medical schools and doctors’ groups think is needed to ensure doubling.

A DHSC spokesperson said: “Training and retaining talented NHS staff is absolutely vital to our mission to build a healthcare service that is fit for the future.

“This government is determined to cut the bureaucracy that weighs down GPs and bring back the GP, so that patients can easily make appointments with their regular GP. We will train thousands more GPs and shift the focus of healthcare from hospitals to the community.”