NHS Long-term Workforce Plan

Margaret Greenwood Excerpts

Monday 3rd July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Steve Barclay]

To take the hon. Gentleman’s first point, the plan does not get into individual specialties. That was a Health Committee recommendation, which I have discussed with the Committee’s Chair, my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Steve Brine). There is a clear reason for that. Within the framework of numbers, the impact of AI and service design will evolve over the 15 years, so it is right that we commit to the number and then the NHS take that work forward with individual specialities and have discussions with the royal colleges.

The hon. Gentleman made a perfectly valid point about boosting capacity. We have already rolled out 108 of the 160 community diagnostic centres that we have committed to deliver. We are also looking to innovate, and I will give two practical examples. Our deal with Moderna, which is looking at individual bespoke vaccines for hard to treat cancers such as pancreatic cancer, will allow us to get ahead on that. We are already seeing a significant reduction in cervical cancer as a result of prevention measures. Likewise, by going into deprived communities with a high preponderance of smoking, the lung cancer screening programme is detecting lung cancer, which often presents late, much earlier, which in turn is having a significant impact on survival rates.

[Margaret Greenwood (Wirral West) (Lab)]

I recently met a constituent who raised the issue of children’s oral health and shared with me her concerns about the staffing crisis in specialist paediatric dentistry. According to the Government’s own statistics, which were released in March, 29.3% of five-year-olds in England have enamel and/or dentinal decay, and the figure was as high as 38.7% in the north-west. The workforce plan talks of expanding dentistry training places by 24% by 2028-29, and by 40% by 2031-32. I note the Secretary of State’s response to my hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame Morris). However, there is no specific mention of specialist paediatric dentistry in the plan, so what will the Secretary of State do to help those children who are desperate for specialist dental treatment right now?

[Steve Barclay]

Without repeating my previous answer on specialty, we are boosting a number of areas. There are 5,000 more doctors and almost 13,000 more nurses this year than last year. I have already touched on increasing the numbers in primary care. There are 44,000 more nurses, so we are on track to deliver our manifesto target of 50,000. There are 25% more within the workforce of the NHS compared with 2010. We are boosting the workforce overall. The plan is iterative and further work will go into which specialities are developed and how resource is prioritised as services are redesigned.