A health minister has admitted that there is a ‘risk’ around whether the Government will achieve its commitment to find 10,000 new GP or GP equivalents, and that failure to achieve the target would make it ‘difficult to deliver our ambitions’.
Lord Prior – who was chair of the CQC before becoming minister for NHS productivity last year – has cast doubt on health secretary Jeremy Hunt’s commitments on GP numbers, which included increasing the workforce by 5,000 GPs by 2020. The minister said that the Government has increased the number of training places to 3,500 from this year.
But Pulse has revealed that there has been a 5% decrease in applications this year, which would lead to only 2,630 places being filled based on last year’s 2,769 filled posts.
Full story in Pulse 21 March 2016