Radiology

(asked on 14th December 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government how many fully registered (1) radiographers, and (2) medical physicists, were working in the NHS in each year from 2016 to 2021; and what steps are they taking to increase the number of such professionals over the next five years.


Answered by
Lord Kamall Portrait
Lord Kamall
This question was answered on 20th December 2021

NHS Digital publishes Hospital and Community Health Services (HCHS) workforce statistics. These include staff working in hospital trusts and clinical commissioning groups, but not staff working in primary care or in general practice surgeries, local authorities or other providers. The following table shows the number of full time equivalent (FTE) professionally qualified HCHS radiographers and medical physicists working in National Health Service trusts as at September each year and the latest available data in August 2021.

Radiographers Medical Physicists

September

2016 16,307 2,819

September

2017 16,884 2,809

September

2018 17,398 2,928

September

2019 17,965 2,975

September

2020 18,555 3,153

August 2021 18,573 3,212

Diagnostic radiography and therapeutic radiography are two of the seven priority professions identified in Health Educations England’s (HEE) Cancer Workforce Plan. HEE has trained more

than 560 radiographers in image interpretation and reporting and is now targeting an additional 150 for 2021/22. Since September 2020 all eligible radiography students can access a new, non-repayable training grant of at least £5,000 per academic year plus a specialist subject payment of £1,000 per academic year.

HEE’s National School of Healthcare Science commissions the Scientist Training Programme (STP) and the Higher Specialist Scientific Training (HSST) programmes for clinical scientists and consultant clinical scientists who will work in the domain of medical physics. Since 2016, 596 medical physicists have been trained via the STP and HSST programmes.

Reticulating Splines