Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many NHS midwives in England are recorded as having retired in each month since January 2020.

NHS Digital collects Hospital and Community Health Services (HCHS) workforce statistics. These include staff working in hospital trusts and Clinical Commissioning Groups, but not staff working in General Practice surgeries, local authorities or other providers.

Data on the National Health Service (NHS) workforce is drawn from the Electronic Staff Record (ESR). ESR is the Human resources (HR) and payroll system for the NHS.

The following table shows data for HCHS midwives who left the NHS with a recorded reason for leaving of ‘retirement’, in England, January 2020 to July 2021, headcount.

The reason for leaving ‘Retirement’ reproduced in these statistics is the value as input by individual organisations as part of their standard HR processes. The reason for leaving information is not completed for all leavers so not all episodes of retirement may be captured in these figures.