Nursing: Higher Education Investment
Debate between Eleanor Smith and Lord Spellar(6 years ago)
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Eleanor Smith
That is definitely so. My hon. Friend is completely right, and with the way Brexit is going, that is understandable. People working in the NHS understand that.
Without policies and funding intervention, as I have said, the shortfall will grow to almost 43,000 by 2023, and that number is on the low side. It does not account for the one third of nurses who are due to retire in the next 10 years. It does not include nursing shortages in social care or public health. Students are being forced to plug the gaps. They should be learning, but instead they are providing care before qualification, without supervision and before they are ready—all because we do not have enough nurses. That is deeply unfair to students. It is risky for qualified nurses and it is unsafe for patients, and all because no one wants to pay for the solution.
Poor workforce planning in health and care is not new. Even in my time, policy makers pursued a boom-to-bust approach, rather than ensuring that supply was available to meet demand. Six years on from the Health and Social Care Act 2012, it is fundamentally unclear who is accountable for workforce strategy. As a result, it is not being done by anyone. Earlier this year, Health Education England held a consultation, but Professor Ian Cumming has failed to deliver a workforce strategy. We are told that it will be dealt with in the new 10-year plan. Mr Simon Stevens, the chief executive of the NHS, has been handed an additional £20.5 billion a year for the NHS by 2023-24, and it is widely understood that his long-term plan must address the extreme gaps in our nursing workforce by fixing the supply issue and providing funding.
John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. I do not think it should focus only on the bursary, as some of the letters have—important though that is—but on the Government’s lamentable failure to bring in nursing apprenticeships, which provide such an important route for many youngsters from working-class areas in the Black Country, including areas in her constituency and mine.
Eleanor Smith
My right hon. Friend covers a point about apprenticeships that I will address in my speech, because what we are saying is that it is one of the routes, but not the only route.