Building the general practice workforce

We need a strong workforce to achieve the vision in the General Practice Forward View and we are working in partnership with Health Education England (HEE), the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) and the British Medical Association (BMA) to deliver an extra 10,000 staff and to strengthen the primary care workforce by 2020/21.

To do this we will:

• Increase the number of GP training places to 3,250 a year to support overall net growth of 5,000 extra doctors by 2020 (compared with 2014).
• Attract up to an extra 500 appropriately trained and qualified doctors from overseas
• Roll out 250 new post-certificate of completion of training (CCT) fellowships to provide further training opportunities in areas of poorest GP recruitment
• Support recruitment in areas to which it has traditionally been hard to recruit by offering £20,000 salary supplements to attract GP trainees to work in these areas
• Recruit an additional 3,000 mental health therapists, a further 1,500 clinical pharmacists, 1,000 new physician associates and piloting new medical assistant roles