3.1 The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Target implementation date: Spring 2023 3.2 Ensuring that the NHS has a workforce in the right numbers and with the right skills to deliver service commitments to patients is crucial. The government is already expanding the size of the workforce, aligning workforce planning with service and financial planning and looking at the long-term strategic drivers of workforce demand and supply. 3.3 Following on from expansion over the last decade, growth of the NHS workforce continues to be a priority for this government, alongside supporting the existing workforce to ensure the NHS meets the rise in demand for health and care services. Ensuring the NHS is well staffed, with colleagues well looked after, is a key focus. An example of this, as demonstrated by the manifesto commitment, is to deliver 50,000 more nurses. 3.4 On longer-term workforce planning, in July 2021 the government commissioned Health Education England to work with partners and review long term strategic trends for the health and regulated social care workforce. This will review and renew the long-term strategic framework for the health workforce, to help ensure the NHS has the right numbers, skills, values and behaviours to deliver world leading clinical services and continued high standards of patient care. For the first time ever, the framework will also include regulated professionals working in social care, like nurses and occupational therapists. 3.5 Building on this work the department of Health and Social Care has recently commissioned NHS England and Improvement and HEE to develop a Long-Term Workforce Plan and key conclusions from this work will be published in due course.