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 increase recruitment of radiologists.

In the Cancer Workforce Plan for England published in December 2017, Health Education England set out the case for additional training support for clinical radiology. The table below shows the increase in accepted post numbers, by recruitment year. Fill rates for clinical radiology in England over the last seven years have always been 100%. Clinical radiology is a popular speciality and each year has on average double the number of appointable candidates for the number of entry points (offers of places to commence the training programme).

Source: Health Education England

Locally, responsibility for assessing and managing staffing levels, including specialty staff, rests with individual National Health Service trusts and their boards who are best placed to decide how many staff they need to provide a given service.