Health spending, and the performance of the NHS, will feature prominently in the upcoming general election campaign. Many different factors matter for NHS performance and for the wider health of the population, but one important factor is the level of spending on health services. In this IFS...

Against a backdrop of increasing demands for health care, the National Health Service (NHS) has long sought ways to increase the number of staff available to provide care to patients. More doctors, nurses, midwives and health-care assistants (HCAs) mean that the NHS can deliver more, and...

One year ago, NHS England published its plan to tackle the backlog of elective care, which had surged following the onset of the pandemic. Since then, as widely expected, waiting lists for NHS treatment in England have continued to grow, increasing by around 1 million between February and...

The 2020 NHS People Plan committed to providing flexible working opportunities to all NHS staff. An important component of flexible working is less-than-full-time (LTFT) working, enabling staff to balance paid work with other commitments. However, there is currently only limited empirical...

NHS waiting lists are likely to be a key issue in the forthcoming general election. The current government has made cutting NHS waiting lists one of its key priorities, while one of the Labour party's five national missions is to "get the NHS back on its feet", including by cutting waiting...

Health is the largest single area of Scottish Government spending, making up 35% of the Scottish Government's total discretionary budget in 2024-25 and 39% of its non-benefit budget.2 Its share of spending has grown significantly over time, driven by large increases in health spending in the...

Medicine is a high-paid and high-status career. It is also a big profession - and expected to grow considerably over coming decades. Understanding differences in access to medical careers by ethnicity, and different career paths within medicine by ethnicity, is therefore an important and...

Last month, the Chancellor set out additional funding for the National Health Service (NHS) in the Autumn Statement. This came alongside the promise of new recovery plans and targets for emergency care and primary care, a recommitment to the elective recovery plan, and a promise of a...

In this report, we examine the career progression of nurses and other staff groups within the NHS Agenda for Change (AfC) pay framework in England over the decade between 2012 and 2021. We document differences in progression across pay bands between staff groups and within groups of nurses to...