Health Professions: Vacancies

(asked on 12th June 2018) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many FTE vacancies there were for (a) registered nurses and (b) medical staff in each year since 2010-11.


Answered by
Steve Barclay Portrait
Steve Barclay
Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
This question was answered on 15th June 2018

The Department does not hold the information as requested.

NHS Improvement published quarterly performance of the National Health Service provider sector since Quarter 1 2017/18.

The latest NHS Improvement vacancy figures are available at the following link on page 24 of the report.

https://improvement.nhs.uk/resources/quarterly-performance-nhs-provider-sector-quarter-4-201718/

The information is outlined in the following table.

Whole Time Equivalent (WTE)

2017/18 Q1

2017/18 Q2

2017/18 Q3

2017/18 Q4

Registered Nursing and Midwifery

Total temporary workforce

30,619

33,110

31,415

37,689

Vacancies

38,328

39,154

35,934

35,794

Medical

Total temporary workforce

8,441

8,889

8,780

9,640

Vacancies

10,848

10,096

9,676

9,982


The information above represents management information only and not an official statistic.

Nursing: NHS trusts employ over 314,000 WTE registered nursing staff. In addition to this substantive workforce, at Q4 2017/18 there are over 35,000 WTE vacancies of which approximately 95% is currently being filled by a combination of bank (65%) and agency staff (35%). This vacancy position has remained relatively static since Q3.

Medical: NHS trusts employ over 112,000 WTE medical staff. In addition to this substantive workforce, as at Q4 2017/18 there are over 9,500 WTE vacancies of which approximately 98% is currently being filled by a combination of bank (45%) and agency (locum) staff (55%). This vacancy position has marginally increased since Q3.

However, the bank and agency staff in addition to covering the vacancy gap is also used to backfill for sickness, maternity, and secondments so that we cannot assume that the temporary workforce (bank and agency) is being used purely to fill the vacancy gap.

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