Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to enable retired doctors to re-enter the NHS workforce to provide treatment and care for patients with covid-19.

The General Medical Council has put in place an emergency temporary Medical Register. Doctors who left the main Medical Register over the six years preceding April 2020 were re-instated, as long as they had been in good standing when they left. Requirements for appraisal and revalidation were suspended for this group.

To accelerate the process to allow doctors to return to the National Health Service workforce and help support the COVID-19 vaccination programme, the Department, NHS England and NHS Improvement, the Care Quality Commission, NHS Resolution and the Home Office have collaborated on reducing the non-statutory and mandatory training requirements for former doctors.