The product of the current system is that you get shortages in key specialties

John Denham, health minister

Heart surgery is one area badly affected because surgeons are some times unable to operate because of a lack of specialist nurses.

The current system for working out staff numbers has calculated the need for GPs, hospital doctors, nurses and other staff separately.

Officials ask hospitals how many of each staff group they think they will need in five years' time and allocate training places as a result.

But a new system, which the government hopes to have in place by the end of the year, will create one group of experts and frontline health service staff working together to calculate the number of training places required across the NHS.

An additional 150 training places for GPs was also announced on Thursday to tackle the recruitment crisis in general practice.

Imbalances

Health Minister John Denham claims the overhaul will address imbalances in the system and says cardiac surgery will be one of the first areas to benefit.

He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "The product of the current system is that you get shortages in key specialties and then other people are not able to do their job because other members of the team are missing.

"We have set out just recently a national service framework for coronary heart disease - the standard and the quality of the service we want to achieve and how we want to cut waiting lists.

"We have now got to work back from that and make sure we plan numbers in each of the specialties we need to make sure we can deliver that higher quality of service."

Ministers have allocated �50m to increase the number of heart operations carried out in the UK by 3,000 over the next three years.

Jules Dussek, president of the Society of Cardiothoracic Surgeons, said: "I have not yet spoken to anyone who has done more surgery this last financial year than they were scheduled to do.

"The reason they are not doing as much as they want to do is a shortage of post-operative recovery beds or intensive care nurses."

'Delighted'

Professor Sir George Alberti, President of the Royal College of Physicians, welcomed the report. He said: "The College is delighted that the Government has taken on board so many of the suggestions we have put forward in relation to workforce planning over the past couple of years."

Dr Peter Hawker, chairman of the British Medical Association's consultants committee, said: "I am pleased to see that the Government is at last proposing proper planning and co-ordination of medical staffing at local level and that health authorities will be given the clear responsibility for implementing this."

Dr John Chisholm, chairman of the BMA's GPs' committee, described the Government's announcement of 150 extra family doctors as being "desperately needed in general practice".

"We face an imminent retirement bulge including the loss of large numbers of overseas born/overseas trained doctors who have been keeping NHS general practice afloat, often in deprived areas.

"To see extra doctors coming in to general practice at the start of their careers is both welcome and desperately necessary."