When the then health secretary, Thérèse Coffey, unveiled her winter plan, criticism focused on her failure to address shortages in the NHS workforce.
This is a longstanding issue and universities have been at the heart of attempts to tackle it.
In 2016, the then Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, promised that medical schools in England would be allowed to offer up to 1,500 extra training places a year with a view to making the NHS self-sufficient in doctors by 2025. In 2018, he announced that five new medical schools would be created, targeting regions where doctors were hard to recruit and where health inequalities were high.
