Nurses: Training

Lord Willis of Knaresborough Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

My Lords, as my noble friend probably knows, we are introducing nursing associates into the NHS. There are a thousand in place today, and a further thousand will come in next year. That is the bridge between healthcare support workers and degree-trained nurses. We recognise that there should be another route into nursing—not just the university route, but a more traditional apprenticeship route.

[Lord Willis of Knaresborough (LD)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Watkins of Tavistock (CB)]

My Lords—

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

My Lords, the best estimate of Health Education England is that, making reasonable assumptions about the attrition rate of students and the retention of existing nurses, by 2020 we will have 40,000 more registered nurses working in the NHS than we do today.

[Lord Willis of Knaresborough]

Will the Minister accept—at last—that simply providing more training places and increasing the number going through both the associate route and the graduate apprentice route is only part of the solution? At the moment we are losing a huge number of nurses, with roughly 10% of our graduate registered nurses going through attrition each year, as the Minister accepted. Two years ago, the Secretary of State gave a mandate to reduce attrition by 50%. Can the Minister tell the House how successful that has been, and can he put in the Library the figures showing how many fewer people are leaving the profession simply because we are not looking after, nurturing or caring for our existing workforce?

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

I think that there is some confusion here. The attrition rate that I was referring to was the one in nursing schools, which on average has been running at about 9.5%. Attrition among the regular workforce, which I think the noble Lord is referring to, is clearly a huge issue for us. Interestingly, we have set up a return-to-practice initiative, which has brought a thousand nurses back into the profession at a cost of £2,000 per person. That is extremely good value if we can persuade people to come back into the service. The noble Lord is absolutely right: people retiring early or leaving early is potentially very damaging for the service. However, I reiterate that the figure of an extra 40,000 nurses in the NHS by 2020 is arrived at after making reasonable assumptions about the level of attrition among the existing workforce.