Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment he has made of the number of clinical vacancies across the NHS; and what steps he is taking to increase recruitment accordingly.

The latest data for June 2021 shows that there are over 38,900 nursing and midwifery vacancies almost 9,700 doctor vacancies. Some of these vacancies will be filled by bank and agency staff.

We are recruiting 50,000 more nurses in this Parliament and supporting record numbers of people to enter medical and nursing training programmes. Alongside this the NHS Retention Programme is continuously seeking to understand why staff leave, resulting in targeted interventions to support staff to stay in the National Health Service.