Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many (a) nurse and (b) doctor vacancies there are in the NHS.

NHS England publishes a compendium of NHS Vacancy Statistics each quarter. The information currently provides four measures of the level of vacancies in the National Health Service, one of which includes the number of medical and registered nursing vacancies reported by NHS trusts to NHS England, which is the most commonly used measure.

Detailed information on the definition of collected data and the available timeseries, along with the measure’s strengths and weaknesses, can be found at the following link:

https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/nhs-vacancies-survey

Data for the period to March 2025 was published on 29 May 2025.

Due to the complex nature of how NHS vacancy data is defined and collected, all data sources should be treated with a degree of caution.