Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, if he will take steps to increase the number of pathologists available to conduct post-mortem examinations for coroners.
Responsibility for staffing levels 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, taking into account skill mix and efficiency.
Working with local providers, it is Health Education England’s responsibility to determine the appropriate numbers of students the NHS needs in training on an annual basis. Its latest Workforce Plan for England covering the period 2016/17 is available in this link:
https://www.hee.nhs.uk/sites/default/files/documents/Workforce%20Plan%20for%20England%202016-17.pdf
The most recent NHS workforce statistics from NHS Digital for staff working in trusts and clinical commissioning groups shows that the full time equivalent number of doctors within the pathology specialty group is 4,125 representing an increase of more than 11% increase since May 2010.