The Department of Health (DH) has commissioned hundreds of new ‘physician assistants’ roles to support GPs, as part of a £5bn plan for 2015 in a bid to expand the number of full-time equivalent GPs by 15 per cent by 2020, and train up 15 per cent more GPs next year.

The Health Education England’s (HEE) paper entitled Workforce Plan for England says it expects co-commissioning to alleviate the current crisis in GP recruitment, and that commissioners will have to consider more recruitment from overseas to support NHS England’s plans for primary care.

It also reveals that HEE will commission 205 physician assistant training posts, representing a 754 per cent increase on last year, which it believes will lead to ‘real improvements in patient care, particularly in emergency care, general adult medicine and general practice.’

The paper also said that HEE would commission 108 ‘broad based training pilots’ for doctors, representing a 50 per cent increase on last year, to provide a more flexible workforce with general skills.

In a further statement, the HEE said that following the publication of NHS England’s five- year plan, more work needs to be done to see how many more GPs need to be trained to help run the new models of care, such as multi-specialty care providers and Primary and Acute Care Systems.

HEE has been working closely with the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) on attracting medical graduates to general practice and said that if partners require the GP workforce to grow more quickly than is achievable through newly trained supply, or at a greater scale, then they would have to consider alternate sources of supply, such as retention schemes, more return to practice than is currently planned and international recruitment of qualified GPs.