Asked by: James MacCleary (Liberal Democrat - Lewes)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to improve support for families affected by baby loss including (a) access to counselling services, (b) support for siblings and (c) training for healthcare professionals in providing compassionate care.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
NHS England’s Three Year Delivery Plan for Maternity and Neonatal services sets out how the National Health Service will make care safer, more personalised, and equitable. The plan includes a commitment to provide compassionate and high-quality care for bereaved families.
To deliver on this commitment, NHS England has made additional funding available to ensure all trusts can offer a seven day a week bereavement service. NHS England has also invested in Maternal Mental Health Services to provide care for women with moderate to complex or severe mental health difficulties, and published the Core Competency Framework for providers, to address known variation in multi-professional training and competency assessment, including for bereavement care.
Additionally, the National Bereavement Care Pathway (NBCP) aims to reduce the variation in the quality of bereavement care provided by the NHS to ensure that parents receive quality and consistent care after pregnancy or baby loss. The pathway acts as a set of standards and guidance that trusts should follow when a patient has suffered a pregnancy or baby loss, with the aim of ensuring that all bereaved parents are offered equal, high quality, individualised, safe, and sensitive care. Since June 2024, all NHS England trusts had signed up to the NBCP.
To support NHS staff to handle a range of difficult situations, NHS England has also launched an e-learning module, Handling difficult situations – Caring for yourself and others with compassion, for NHS staff in frontline, patient facing roles. This e-learning module, which is available for free, aims to help upskill colleagues in how to handle difficult situations with compassion, using appropriate communication techniques and active listening skills.
Asked by: James MacCleary (Liberal Democrat - Lewes)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to (a) prevent heart disease and stroke, (b) prioritise timely NHS heart care and (c) accelerate research into future treatments and cures.
Answered by Andrew Gwynne - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
We are committed to ensuring that fewer lives are lost to the biggest killers, such as heart disease, which includes cardiovascular diseases (CVD), and stroke.
The NHS Health Check, England’s flagship CVD prevention programme, engages over 1.3 million people each year and prevents approximately 500 heart attacks or strokes. To improve access and engagement to this life saving check, we are developing a digital NHS Health Check, a service which people can use at home to understand and act on their CVD risk, providing people with a more flexible, accessible, and convenient service. We are also piloting a new programme to deliver more than 130,000 lifesaving heart health checks in workplaces across the country.
The NHS Long Term Plan (NHS LTP) is committed to improving the care and outcomes for people with CVD through enhanced diagnostic support in the community, better personalised planning, and increased access to disease-specific rehabilitation. NHS England’s stroke priorities include rapid diagnosis and increased access to time-dependent acute stroke care, as well as facilitating ambulance service use of pre-hospital telemedicine, and supporting access to the use of artificial intelligence decision support tools for brain imaging.
Asked by: James MacCleary (Liberal Democrat - Lewes)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many EU-born staff were working in the NHS in each year since 2010.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Department does not collect data on where staff working in the National Health Service were born. However, NHS England publishes quarterly data on the number of staff split by nationality in NHS trusts and other core organisations in England. The following table shows the number of staff working in the NHS in England with nationalities from the European Union, each September from 2010 until June 2024, the most recent data point available:
Date | Headcount of staff |
September 2010 | 30,032 |
September 2011 | 32,259 |
September 2012 | 34,418 |
September 2013 | 38,334 |
September 2014 | 45,066 |
September 2015 | 52,808 |
September 2016 | 59,796 |
September 2017 | 61,974 |
September 2018 | 63,484 |
September 2019 | 65,741 |
September 2020 | 68,919 |
September 2021 | 70,056 |
September 2022 | 71,174 |
September 2023 | 74,969 |
June 2024 | 77,289 |
All staff within NHS trusts and commissioning bodies provide a self-reported nationality which is recorded on the Electronic Staff Record system. This may reflect an individual’s cultural heritage rather than their country of birth, with some individuals choosing not to specify it.
Asked by: James MacCleary (Liberal Democrat - Lewes)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many vacancies were advertised in the NHS in each year since 2010.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Department does not hold the information requested. NHS England publishes a compendium of NHS Vacancy Statistics each quarter. Whilst none of the data published is the exact number of vacancies advertised in the National Health Service, the information does currently provide three measures of the level of vacancies in the NHS. Detailed information on the definition of collected data and the available timeseries, along with the measure’s strengths and weaknesses, is available at the following link:
https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/nhs-vacancies-survey
The earliest data within this collection is from 2016, and no data is held prior to this period. Due to the complex nature of how NHS vacancy data is defined and collected, all data sources should be treated with a degree of caution.
Asked by: James MacCleary (Liberal Democrat - Lewes)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether the proposed restrictions on puberty blockers will apply to those already using these medications.
Answered by Karin Smyth - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
In May 2024, a three-month emergency order restricting the sale and supply of Gonadotrophin-Releasing Hormone Analogues (puberty blockers) was introduced in Great Britain and was due to expire on 2 September 2024.
On 22 August 2024, the Government laid a further Order to renew the restrictions in Great Britain. As the Northern Ireland First Minister and Deputy First Minister provided their agreement for the Minister of Health to co-sign the order, the restrictions also extend to Northern Ireland for the first time.
Ensuring that care is safe, evidence-based and appropriate was the driving force behind the decision by my rt. Hon. Friend, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. The Cass Review was categorically clear that there is not enough evidence on the long-term impact of using puberty blockers to treat gender incongruence to know whether they are safe or if children benefit from them.
The Order prohibits the sale and supply of puberty blockers for any purposes to those under 18 against prescriptions from prescribers registered in the European Economic Area (EEA) or Switzerland. For private prescriptions issued from registered prescribers in the United Kingdom, the Order prohibits the sale or supply of puberty blockers for gender incongruence or dysphoria to children under 18 years old not already on a course of treatment with them. Patients receiving these medicines for other uses, for example precocious puberty, can continue to access them.
If a young person has already been prescribed these medicines, for gender dysphoria or incongruence in the six months prior to 3 June 2024 in Great Britain or 27 August 2024 in Northern Ireland, they can continue to do so, providing their prescription is now issued by a UK registered prescriber. They are strongly advised to meet with their prescribing clinician to fully understand the safety risks. For those patients accessing prescriptions from an EEA registered prescriber, they can seek help from a UK private provider or see their general practitioner.