NHS vacancy rate at record level

AT LEAST one in 38 NHS jobs in the East Midlands is unfilled - the highest figure on record.

New data shows that the equivalent of 80,945 people were working full-time in the NHS in the region in March.

During the same month there were 2,171 adverts for full-time NHS positions.

This meant that a full-strength NHS in the region would have at least 83,116 staff and that at least 2.6 per cent of posts were vacant.

The NHS has published monthly data on vacancies and its current staff going back to February 2015 and this figure is the highest on record for the East Midlands.

During this time it has fluctuated between 1.9 per cent (one in 53) and 2.6 per cent (one in 38).

If anything, the real vacancy rate could be higher because the NHS sometimes advertises multiple jobs in the same advert.

The data includes both frontline doctors and nurses and support staff.

Community health services were the most common area to be advertised in the East Midlands, followed by admin jobs and then general medicine.

In March the NHS employed more than one million people in England - two per cent more than the year before.

Slightly more than half of them were doctors, nurses, paramedics and other medically-trained staff. The rest were backroom staff and managers.

The NHS in the East Midlands has also grown, employing the equivalent of 2,893 more people full-time in March 2017 than it did in March 2016.