Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, pursuant to the Answer of 8 November 2017 to Question 111080, when his Department plans to begin to collect data on (a) mental health, (b) substance misuse and (c) learning disability nurses recruitment and retention to inform future workforce planning.

The information held by NHS Digital is based upon the National Workforce Data Set which allows for the capture of nationally consistent information about the mental health and learning disability nurses for the purposes of monitoring and workforce planning. This does not capture a sufficient level of detail to allow the investigation of very specialist services including substance misuse nurses.

At present NHS Digital is engaged in a sub-group of the Workforce Information Review Group. This is tasked with scoping the information requirements of the system related to healthcare recruitment, and to produce proposals to enhance the information available. Part of this work includes giving consideration to current data gaps.