Healthcare Workforce Statistics, England, 2015, Experimental Statistics

In an NHS with an increasingly diverse range of providers, collecting comprehensive workforce information will become ever more difficult. In order to address this, the Health and Social Care Act 2012 places a duty on all organisations that deliver care funded by the NHS to provide data on their current workforce and to share their anticipated future workforce needs.

The Workforce Information Architecture (WIA) workstream was established in 2011 by the Department of Health (DH) as part of the wider reform of Education and Training. Within this workstream there was requirement to develop a workforce Minimum Data Set (wMDS), to support high quality education and training commissioning. This work seeks to ensure that with refinement the minimum data set remains suitable for the purpose of collecting workforce information from all providers of Healthcare services. The wMDS meets the requirements of workforce planners and will enable them to effectively plan and commission the future qualified workforce to meet the needs of local providers.

This publication is based on the results of the first wMDS collection as at 31 March 2015. As a new collection its results must be further understood, as such these statistics are experimental and subject to change. More information on the quality of the information gathered in this wMDS collection can be found in the Data Quality section of the publication pdf. Key facts about the current healthcare workforce in England can be found in the Executive Summary.