It takes 6 years to qualify as a doctor, and then the same again to specialise fully. What sort of timescale did you have in mind for scalability?
That assumes nobody qualified ever leaves.
Military personnel can be called back to active duty at any time if they have ever served. There's probably over 100k doctors and nurses that have either retired in the last 5 years or left the profession to do something else that could be called back in this exceptional time. Yes, they'd need a refresher course, but we've had months of notice here, so while it would have been unpopular with the former staff, it should have been done.
The calc following is a bit vague because its stats not data, but given the NHS has about 6 million staff, if we assume even half of them have ever qualified as a nurse or doc, then we have 3 million active medical staff. 3 million divided by a 45 year career is 66-67k retirees per year if everyone stayed the course. That gives us a pool of roughly 350k people that could be called back into service minus those that left the NHS to work in the private sector who just got annexed. Again, assume half, so we should have 150-175k medical staff we could summon for retraining and redeployment.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
