Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many nurses have (a) participated in the Return to Practice programme and (b) subsequently returned to practice within the NHS in each year since 2015.

Health Education England (HEE) has launched a successful campaign on their Return to practice programmes. These programmes are key to ensuring the National Health Service makes it as simple and flexible as possible for those that have left the workforce to return. Since the programme began in 2014 the number of nurses that have successfully completed the course and are now ready to enter employment stands at 3,596 (this is from September 2014 to March 2017).

HEE does not collect data on the numbers that have returned to employment.