NHS: Staff Numbers

Lord Allan of Hallam Excerpts

Tuesday 12th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Markham (Con)]

I thank my noble friend. Like all of us, I am sure, I was appalled to hear about that study. The most fundamental purpose of any employer is the safety and well-being of their staff, obviously, and I am afraid that the hospitals that allowed that to happen and allowed that culture to take place clearly failed. Clearly, we need to get to the bottom of that. As I often say, it starts with the leadership in each hospital and the culture that is built up within each college. Those are the people who need to be looking at themselves in the mirror and asking whether they have the right culture to make sure that everyone feels safe in the workplace.

[Lord Allan of Hallam (LD)]

My Lords, we know that the Minister is a big fan of data dashboards for tracking such things as the flow of patients through hospitals. Does he agree that such a dashboard would be an excellent way for us to track the Government’s progress against all the various targets that they have put into their workforce plan? Will he commit to producing one?

[Lord Markham (Con)]

I believe that the whole point of the workforce plan is that every couple of years there is a review of our progress against it and how it needs to be adapted, since it is a moving feast. So, absolutely, it is vital and something we are working on. Overall, the things that we said that we would do we are on course for. We said that we would increase the number of nurses by 50,000 over the course of this Parliament. It is currently 47,000. We said that we would increase doctors’ appointments by 50 million. That is currently on track. So a lot of good work has already happened. A lot of targets have been hit. Yes, there is more to be done and we are happy to track it.