Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many vacancies were advertised in the NHS in each year since 2010.

The Department does not hold the information requested. NHS England publishes a compendium of NHS Vacancy Statistics each quarter. Whilst none of the data published is the exact number of vacancies advertised in the National Health Service, the information does currently provide three measures of the level of vacancies in the NHS. Detailed information on the definition of collected data and the available timeseries, along with the measure’s strengths and weaknesses, is available at the following link:

https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/nhs-vacancies-survey

The earliest data within this collection is from 2016, and no data is held prior to this period. Due to the complex nature of how NHS vacancy data is defined and collected, all data sources should be treated with a degree of caution.