Is half of the NHS not clinically qualified?

“It cannot be right that in England today 51% of people who work for the NHS are not clinically qualified.”

Paul Nuttall MEP, 4 December 2016

This is about right, although like a lot of our explanations, the precise answer depends on how you count it.

There are two ways that the NHS counts its staff: the number of individual people who work for it, and the number of ‘full-time equivalent’ jobs that are filled.

Neither way seems to reach quite the same figure as Mr Nuttall quoted, though both are fairly close, so we’ve asked UKIP which figure he was referring to.

What do individual staff numbers tell us?

51% of people working for the NHS were “professionally qualified clinical staff” in March 2016. Mr Nuttall had suggested that 51% aren’t clinically qualified, which is presumably mixing the figures up. But his basic point is correct: about half of NHS staff have a clinical qualification, the other half don’t.

This includes doctors and nurses working in GP surgeries as well as those working in hospitals and community health services.

Just over 1.3 million people work in these areas, including almost 685,000 who are clinical staff. Roles that require clinical qualifications include doctors, nurses, midwives, ambulance staff and various other scientific and technical staff like pharmacists, therapists and lab assistants.

NHS workers who aren’t clinically qualified can include support staff, some managers and other staff such as those working as receptionists or in personnel.

What about full-time roles?

You can also calculate the number of full-time jobs filled by people. By this count, 53% of NHS staff are clinically qualified. There are just over 1.15 million full time NHS roles, so this means around 610,000 are held by clinically qualified staff.

But these figures do come with a health warning. NHS Digital, which publishes them, says that they are still experimental statistics because of recent changes in the way data is collected and reported.