National Health Service: Nurses

Baroness Masham of Ilton Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

My noble friend makes an excellent point. Currently, around 7% of nurses are EU nationals. There has not been a drop-off in the number of EU nationals joining the NHS workforce since the referendum; nevertheless, it is clearly sensible to reduce our reliance on overseas nurses each year. We are doing that through additional training places and through retention and return to work schemes.

[Baroness Masham of Ilton (CB)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that there is a shortage of district nurses, who are important in rural areas, and that many of them are coming up to retirement age?

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

I thank the noble Baroness for making that point. The issue of retirement ages has come up previously in Questions, and I had a look at the profiling of nursing. It similar to the profiling of other healthcare professions and other public sector professions, so there is a weighting towards older age groups, but it is not an acute problem particular to nursing. The noble Baroness is quite right that there have been reductions in the number of district nurses, but there have also been increases in other kinds of nurses, particularly health visitors offering community services. There is some overlap in the kind of services they provide.