The large number of unfilled NHS job vacancies is posing a serious risk to patient safety, a report by MPs says.

It found England is now short of 12,000 hospital doctors and more than 50,000 nurses and midwives, calling this the worst workforce crisis in NHS history.

It said a reluctance to decisively plug the staffing gap could threaten plans to tackle the Covid treatment backlog.

The government said the workforce is growing and NHS England is drawing up long-term plans to recruit more staff.

Former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who chairs the Commons health and social care select committee that produced the report, said tackling the shortage must be a “top priority” for the new prime minister when they take over in September.

“Persistent understaffing in the NHS poses a serious risk to staff and patient safety, a situation compounded by the absence of a long-term plan by the government to tackle it,” he said.

Living in one of the remotest communities in England, the residents of Alston Moor in Cumbria count themselves lucky to be surrounded by the breathtaking peaks of the Pennines.

But living somewhere so beautiful comes with downsides – there are just a couple of pubs, it is many miles to the nearest supermarket and a takeaway delivery is out of the question.

And now the community of 2,500 people is at risk of losing what it believes is vital to its health and survival – its local ambulance service. Alston Moor currently has four emergency medical technicians (EMTs) who live locally and operate an ambulance serving the 80-square-mile area.

But if North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) proposals go ahead, the EMTs will be replaced by a community first responder – a trained member of the public rather than a professional – who can reach an emergency quickly to help patients until an ambulance arrives from elsewhere in the county.

More than 200 people silently protested against the plans outside a meeting between the parish council and NWAS last week. District councillor and local GP Michael Hanley said the removal of the service could cost lives. “Never have we had a situation where we haven’t had a local ambulance.If we rely on Penrith or Carlisle, it can take two to three hours for an ambulance to come, and the community first responders are not trained to the same level at all as the EMTs.

“[Doctors] talk about the ‘golden hour’ – the time between when the person rings on the phone to getting them to hospital – so if there’s something very dire like a severe heart attack or a severe accident, that first hour is very, very important. If it takes two-and-a-half to three hours for an ambulance to get here, it’s possible some people will die,” he said.

Patient safety is frequently at risk in NHS hospital trusts in England, with 70% of them failing to meet national safety standards, according to an Observer analysis of inspection reports, with staff shortages the biggest problem.

Reports by the regulator the Care Quality Commission (CQC) reveal that managers at one trust failed to act on staff reports of abuse and violence, while a shortage of critical beds at another trust led to three serious incidents resulting in patient harm.

Of 148 acute and general hospital trusts, safety standards at 96 are rated as “requires improvement” by the CQC; six are rated inadequate, the lowest category. The others are rated good, with none outstanding.

Of the 14 inspection reports published since the start of June, half raised concerns over inadequate staffing levels. One trust, Imperial College Healthcare in London, “did not always have enough staff with the right qualifications, skills, training and experience to keep people safe from avoidable harm and abuse and to provide the right care and treatment”.

Shrewsbury and Telford hospital trust was rated inadequate for safety last year. The number of nurses in its urgent and emergency services was “not sufficient to manage the department safely”, and the inspectors “saw these low staffing levels directly impact on patients’ safe care and treatment”. Nurses who had not received the right support or training had to co-ordinate the department for two months before the inspection because of staff shortages. A trust spokesman told the Observer improvements were being made.

Every building contains radon but the levels are usually low. The chances of a higher level depend on the type of ground. Public Health England has published a map showing where high levels are more likely. The darker the colour the greater the chance of a higher level. The chance is less than one home in a hundred in the white areas and greater than one in three in the darkest areas.

The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) will soon begin a major campaign to recruit health workers from other countries to meet growing staff shortages.

Reports suggest a strategy has been drawn up to target a number of countries around the world, including poorer nations outside Europe.

One estimate in March this year said the NHS will need 5,000 extra nurses every year – three times the figure it currently recruits annually.

But what about the countries that it will recruit from – what impact will it have on them?

Where do non-UK staff come from?

The NHS already recruits globally to meet its staffing needs.

More than 12% of the workforce reported their nationality as not British, according to a report published last year.

The biggest group of foreign NHS workers are from the EU – 56 in every 1,000.

Access issues exist in every English region, but Lincolnshire is the area worst hit, followed by parts of Norfolk, Derbyshire, West Yorkshire and Cornwall, according to the NHS data.

Despite a wide-ranging NHS 10-year plan announced last month, the BDA says there was little good news for dentists and it says government spending on dentistry has fallen by more than 10 per cent in the last five years.

Professor John Appleby, the Nuffield Trust’s chief economist and director of research, said:  “The evidence is mounting that small and remote hospitals face higher costs that they cannot avoid, with comparatively poor performance against key NHS measures and dire financial positions.

“It is certainly worrying that the methods used to allocate funding to these hospitals are inconsistent, obscure and depend so heavily on judgment. We recommend that the true scale of costs is examined again, and that national bodies are much clearer about how they make their funding decisions.”

Jan Sobieraj, chief executive of the National Centre for Rural Health and Care, said: “This report is showing us that there is growing evidence that rural healthcare is not properly funded.”

“The choice that trusts in these areas have is to either have a deficit, or find themselves in danger of not having enough resources to cover the service.”

The report said efforts to adjust funding to recognise unavoidable differences in the cost of land, buildings and labour have been in place since the early 1980’s but tended to work to the advantage of urban areas.

And it said attempts to give small uplifts to some remote areas had been allocated in an “arbitrary manner” leaving some with nothing extra.

Primary and community healthcare in England will benefit from a real-terms boost of £3.5bn a year by 2023/24, the government has announced.

The spending, part of the NHS long term plan backed by £20.5bn over the next five years, is intended to improve care in the home, and thereby avoid patients unnecessarily going to – or staying in – hospital.

It will help fund 24/7 community-based rapid response teams made up of doctors, nurses and physiotherapists to provide urgent care and support for patients better treated at home than in hospital.

Additionally, the cash will go on assigning healthcare professionals to care homes where they get to know individual residents’ needs and can provide tailored treatment and support. The teams, including pharmacists and GPs, will also offer emergency care out of hours.

Announcing the funding increase on Thursday before a visit to a north London health centre, Theresa May said: “Many patients would be much better off being cared for in the community.

A private healthcare company has sent letters to hundreds of GPs setting out a price list of operations they could offer their patients to beat NHS delays and restrictions.

Care UK, which runs nine centres offering treatment on the NHS, said it intended to use spare theatre time to provide “self pay” procedures ranging from earwax removal to hip replacements.

The company said it was trialling the scheme at two treatment centres in the west of England but insisted core work at the sites would remain NHS referrals.

The move has, however, alarmed some GPs and health campaigners who fear it is another example of creeping privatisation in the NHS.

The procedures are being offered at the Emersons Green treatment centre near Bristol and a second centre in Devizes in Wiltshire. The list of treatments on offer ranges from earwax removal (£160) to hip replacements at just under £9,000. Other procedures being offered include cataract surgery, tonsillectomies and vasectomies.

Mike Campbell of campaign group Protect Our NHS said: “It is totally wrong that hard-pressed GPs are being encouraged to recommend their patients to a private company where patients will be paying when they should be getting their treatments free.

The number of GPs in England has fallen sharply in the past year, despite a government pledge to increase the supply of family doctors by 5,000.

The total number of full-time equivalent GPs working in England dropped by 1,193 in the year to September, figures from NHS Digital show.

The numbers have shrunk despite efforts by the NHS, ministers and GP bodies to persuade existing family doctors to stay in post and to encourage medical graduates to make a career in general practice.

The decrease raises doubts over whether Jeremy Hunt’s pledge to increase GPs by 5,000 by 2020, which was first made in 2015, will be delivered. Labour accused the health secretary of “astonishing failure” on a key NHS target.

Krishna Kasaraneni, a family doctor and British Medical Association spokesman on GP issues, said: “It is clear from these figures that the NHS is falling some way short of its pledge to recruit 5,000 GPs by 2020, with in fact these numbers showing that the workforce has shrunk by more than 1,000 in England.”

GP practices often do not have the staff needed to treat the growing demand from patients for appointments, caused by the growing and ageing population.

The chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners, Helen Stokes-Lampard, said: “GPs across the country will be gravely concerned about these figures. We understand that change takes time, but we desperately need more family doctors and we need them sooner rather than later.”