Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many clinical jobs there are in the NHS; what proportion of those jobs are staffed by overseas workers; and how many vacancies in clinical roles there are, as of 15 June 2022. .

NHS Digital publishes Hospital and Community Health Services (HCHS) workforce statistics. These include staff working in hospital trusts and clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) in England, but not staff working in primary care or in general practice surgeries, local authorities or other providers. The information requested as of 15 June 2022 is not currently held. However, as of December 2021, there were 642,560 full-time equivalent (FTE) professionally qualified clinical staff working in National Health Service trusts and CCGs. This includes 127,959 doctors and 339,942 nurses, midwives and health visitors.

The following table shows the FTE number and proportion of professionally qualified clinical staff by self-reported nationality as at December 2021. Nationality does not imply that workers were trained or previously worked overseas.

Source: NHS Digital Workforce Statistics

NHS Digital publishes quarterly vacancy data collected by NHS England and NHS Improvement for NHS hospital trusts for three staff groups: doctors, registered nurses and ‘other staff’. The following table shows the number of FTE nursing vacancies and medical vacancies as of March 2022. Many of the vacancies will be filled by bank and agency staff.

Source: NHS Digital Vacancy Statistics