Dame Tessa Jowell – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Dame Tessa Jowell on 2015-01-15.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many vacant A&E consultant posts there were in the NHS excluding London (a) on the most recent date for which figures are available and (b) in each of the previous six years.

Dr Daniel Poulter

Information on vacancies is not collected by the Department. The last annual National Health Service vacancy survey in England was undertaken by the Health and Social Care Information Centre in 2010. The survey was suspended in 2011 and then discontinued in 2013 following the publication of the Fundamental Review of Data Returns, which aimed to reduce the burden of the collection of data from NHS organisations.

The attached table provides vacancy data for 2009 and 2010, the only two years within the last six years for which data is available.