The Government is not on track to recruit its target number of GPs, Sajid Javid has confirmed.
However, the Health Secretary said the NHS now has the “highest number ever” of nurses, following a recruitment drive promised by the Government at the last election.
Asked on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show if the Government was on course to meet its promise of 6,000 more GPs, Mr Javid said: “We are not on course at the moment. Not for the 6,000. Let’s wait and see where we eventually get to.
“We do have more GPs in general practice. We have, I think in the last two years since we made that commitment, we have almost 2,000 more in general practice.”
Mr Javid said with Covid-19 becoming the priority for the NHS in the last two years, the target had been not being met.
But he also said: “In the last year we have got over 3,000 more doctors, we have got 9,000 more nurses and that is great, and the number of nurses today we have got in the NHS is the highest number ever.
“We have got more students in medical school than at any other time in our history,” he added.
Mr Javid’s comments come ahead of what is expected to be a difficult winter for the health service.
The Health Secretary said on Trevor Phillips On Sunday on Sky News that the NHS backlog is currently 5.9 million people and is set to grow.
Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, said there is a “high degree of concern” about the challenges the health service is facing.
He told Sky News: “We are under an unprecedented degree of pressure for this time of year, and what we’re experiencing is very, very high levels of volume of people coming into accident and emergency departments, we know we’ve got the ambulance services under real pressure.”
In its 2019 manifesto, the Conservative Party committed to recruiting “50,000 nurses”, as well as 6,000 doctors into general practice.
