The NHS has more staff than ever before; there are now 1.3 million doctors, nurses and administrative staff working in the health service in England alone
The NHS workforce is larger than ever, official figures show.
In September 2023, more than 1.3 million doctors, nurses and administrative staff were employed full-time in the healthcare sector in England.
It marks an increase of over a third in ten years.
The figures come amid repeated warnings of a staffing crisis that insiders say is jeopardizing efforts to tackle backlogs in the NHS.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) analysis shows that the number of staff in all groups has increased over the past decade.
Doctors saw the highest spike (37 percent), with 138,000 now working in healthcare – up from just over 100,000 in 2013.
The number of nurses, midwives and health visitors also increased by more than a fifth (363,000).
Clinical support staff – including physical therapy assistants and prosthetic technicians – make up the largest portion of the workforce, accounting for 405,000 employees.
The NHS receives around £160 billion a year, much of which is spent on paying staff.
But despite rising bills and a growing workforce, right-wing think tanks say performance has deteriorated. As such, the NHS has been described as a ‘black hole of taxpayers’ money’.
The last time the NHS nationally met its emergency department time target – which required 95 per cent of patients to be admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours of arrival – was in 2015.
Meanwhile, a National Audit Office report last year found it has not achieved its target of completing all ambulance transfers in hospitals within 30 minutes since it started collecting data in November 2017.
Queues for routine treatments have risen to a record high in the wake of the pandemic, with 7.6 million people currently queuing in England alone.
By comparison, the waiting list in England was 4.6 million in December 2019.
The latest statistics also show that England’s population has grown by 3.4 million (6.5 percent) in ten years, expanding NHS services even further.
The English population is also aging.
The Health Foundation estimates that the number of people over 85 will double to 2.6 million over the next 25 years.
The proportion of older people aged over 75 with long-term conditions has also risen, with needs likely to become more complex, increasing demand for NHS services.
Current ONS figures show the number of doctors registered with the General Medical Council in the UK was 296,000 as of December 2022 – the latest data available.
This is an increase from almost a fifth (18.4 percent) reported in December 2018 (250,000).
The latest data from the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) also shows that there were almost 798,000 nurses, midwives and dual registrants on the register in Britain as of September 30, 2023.
It was up 15 percent from the 693,000 registered in September 2018.
However, officials have long warned that the NHS’s over-reliance on nurses and midwives from abroad is ‘not sustainable’.
It comes as estimates released by NHS Digital last month show that foreigners represent a fifth of all NHS staff in England.
Three in ten nurses and over a third of doctors are non-UK residents – the first time this milestone has been reached.
There are now around 215 nationalities represented in the NHS workforce.
The latest figures show that the number of UK-trained nurses registered to work in Britain has risen by 22,000 since 2019.
Yet this is half the increase in the number of foreign-trained staff over the same period, which is closer to 44,000. It means international recruits account for two-thirds of the growth.
Some also come from ‘red list’ countries, where the World Health Organization considers the shortage of nurses to be serious and is urging rich countries not to poach staff.