Responding to the Financial Times's report on the draft NHS England workforce plan, Dr Amit Kochhar, BMA workforce lead, said:

"We will wait to see the full plan, but it is crushingly disappointing to see Government apparently planning to simply accept that the low number of doctors we have in this country is just a fact of life.

"Anyone who has recently visited an A&E department or a GP surgery will have experienced first hand how understaffed the health system is. Doctors see it every day. In the latest GMC staff survey 72% of responding doctors cited inadequate staffing as a barrier to providing good patient care. Countries like Germany have 4.6 doctors per 1000 people compared to our 3.4. The UK already has much lower staffing that most of its European neighbours. 

"The Covid Inquiry made clear that the insufficient workforce was at the heart of many of our failures to respond to the pandemic. To now look at the overwhelming evidence of the impact of reduced staffing and conclude that it can be fixed with a dash of extra technology does not inspire confidence in those planning our workforce.

"No one disputes that AI can be helpful to doctors. What they do dispute is the idea that doctors can be replaced by it. A chat bot cannot look after a patient. And even if it could, our experience of the NHS’s ability to adopt new technology gives us very little hope that staking all our chips on AI would work. Some NHS institutions are still struggling to cope with decades-old technology. There is also little evidence that mooted “productivity bonuses” arising from technological implementation would do much more than incentivise churn over quality healthcare, at the expense of patients' safety.

“Anyone who has visited a hospital or a GP surgery could tell you that the solution is doctors, in greater numbers, paid well enough to retain their skills and expertise, able to look after our patients with autonomy and trust. Instead, the NHS seems content to replace doctors with lesser qualified staff while resident doctors face unemployment from ludicrous specialty training bottlenecks.

“It appears that the long-mooted idea of raiding pension pots to make up for real terms pay cuts will also feature in this plan. Robbing Peter to pay Paul has never been made for a sound workforce plan and we will make this clear if and when consulted by Government.

"This appears to be a massive, dangerous gamble from Government that the need for a larger workforce can be wished away, and defies comprehension particularly at a time when there are significant numbers of underemployed and even unemployed doctors including many fully qualified GPs. We fervently hope the final version of this plan looks very different."

Notes to editors