NHS England has ‘no chance’ of filling staff shortages

Patients will be forced to visit pharmacists and physiotherapists for medical support rather than their GP as doctor shortages worsen over the coming decade, a group of leading think tanks has predicted.

In a newly published report, the Nuffield Trust, Health Foundation and King’s Fund estimate that current nurse shortages of 30,000 will more than double to 70,000 within the next five years, with GP vacancies increasing from 3,000 to 7,000. And after a decade, the gap could be 100,000 and 11,000 respectively.

The Government insists plans are in place to recruit more staff - but experts believe NHS England “has no chance of training enough GPs and nurses to solve the shortages it faces”, says the BBC.

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The new report warns: “The shortfall in the number of GPs is so serious that it cannot be filled at all. The only way forward is to use the skills of other staff, including pharmacists and physiotherapists, much more widely and routinely in and alongside general practice.”

With GP shortages expected to worsen as growing numbers of over-worked doctors quit, the think tanks are calling for a combination of international recruitment, student grants and innovation to tackle the crisis.

The experts estimate that training and developing staff to meet demand across the entire health service would require an extra £900m a year to the NHS budget by 2023-24.

They recommend offering a £5,200 grant for living expenses to nurses in training, and tripling the number of postgraduates in training and bringing 5,000 more students onto nursing courses every year, reports Sky News.

The report also calls for a further 5,000 new nurses to be recruited from abroad every year - three times the current figure - but warns that the current proposed post-Brexit migration system may hamper this process.

Report co-author Anita Charlesworth said: “The workforce is the make-or-break issue for the health service. Unless staffing shortages are substantially reduced, the recent NHS Long Term Plan can only be a wish list.”

The NHS is expected to release a workforce implementation plan this spring, with funding to be outlined in the Comprehensive Spending Review in the autumn. The plan will be the first ever long-term NHS workforce strategy.