Building the general practice workforce

We need to recruit a strong workforce to achieve the vision in the General Practice Forward View (GP 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.

Since the launch of the GP Forward view we have:

• Begun to 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).
• Allocated funding for 500 appropriately trained and qualified doctors from overseas to work in practices in England
• Supported 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

We are also looking to roll out 250 new post-certificate of completion of training (CCT) fellowships to provide further training opportunities in areas of poorest GP recruitment

We will also increasing the number of multidisciplinary staff in primary care by:

• Recruiting an additional 1,500 clinical pharmacists 
• Supporting the co-location of 3,000 mental health therapists
• Introducing 1,000 physician associates in to general practice
  • A range of resources about the role and impact of Physician Associations in primary care are available at the Faculty of Physician Associates website