About

About the tracker

The NHS in England employs some 1.7 million people, making it Europe’s biggest employer. While this number has increased over time and more services are being delivered, concerns remain about shortfalls and sustainability of the NHS workforce.

In order to monitor key developments in staff numbers and the commitments made to the NHS workforce, we have created an NHS staffing tracker. The tracker is intended to provide transparency on progress against many of the projections detailed in the Long Term Workforce Plan, as well as other ambitions detailed in recent national policy documents.

As a first effort to model future staffing needs, the Workforce Plan projections had significant weaknesses; however, the expectation is that the modelling will be iterative. When projections are amended, we will update the tracker to monitor progress against the latest government plans.

Different factors can affect trends in the NHS workforce at any given time, such as the state of the economy, migration policies, and most recently the Covid-19 pandemic. Where possible, we have provided some additional context to issues that might have had a significant impact on the number of people training or working as health care professionals.

How we chose which workforce measures to track

There are, of course, more measures of the state of NHS staffing than can be manageably compiled in one tracker. We have tried to prioritise some more critical measures, informed in part by those which have measurable ambitions. In some cases, these national ambitions have not been described in great detail, so we have had to make assumptions as to how to apply them to the available data. In the case of the Long Term Workforce Plan projections, we will extrapolate trends to the end of the financial year – for example, 2028/29 would extend to March 2029. We have also only included measures where data are updated regularly in readily available datasets. We have given trends back to 2009 but for some measures this is not possible.

How the tracker is structured

The three areas covered in this dashboard are:

Hospital and community services staff
General practice staff
Training staff

Data

We have selected the indicators in order to focus on workforce areas that are measurable. We suggest looking at the NHS Digital website for additional or more detailed data on the NHS workforce. Key sources for this dashboard are NHS Digital’s monthly NHS Workforce Statistics and quarterly General Practice Workforce Statistics, HEE board papers, UCAS data and the Department for Education. We have not covered social care within our dashboard since it is included in The King’s Fund’s Social Care 360, with data available from Skills for Care.

We have generally used full-time equivalent (FTE) data, which refers to the proportion of full-time contracted hours that the post-holder is contracted to work. An FTE of 1 is equivalent to a full-time worker, whereas an FTE of 0.5 indicates an employee contracted to working half the time to that of a full-time worker. This figure does not capture overtime. If we have not used FTE, this is clarified in the notes for that particular measure.

Have your say

We welcome comments on the dashboard, suggestions for areas of interest and are always interested in working with experts in their areas. Please email lucina.rolewicz@nuffieldtrust.org.uk