Midwives: Labour Turnover

(asked on 23rd February 2022) - View Source

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 support the (a) retention and (b) recruitment of midwives in (i) London and (ii) England.


Answered by
Edward Argar Portrait
Edward Argar
Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
This question was answered on 22nd March 2022

NHS England and NHS Improvement recently invested £95 million to support the recruitment of an additional 1,200 midwives and 100 obstetricians and for multi-disciplinary team training.

The NHS People Recovery Task Force and the NHS Retention Programme is also providing targeted interventions to understand the reasons why staff leave and support them to stay within the National Health Service. There are local initiatives to increase participation rates, convert agency workers to substantive staff and release clinical time. Target growth is allocated to regions based on the birth to midwife ratio in each region in order to meet midwifery workforce needs.

The Department has commissioned the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists to develop a new workforce planning tool to improve how maternity units calculate staffing requirements. This is expected in June 2022 and will guide trust-level obstetrician numbers. NHS England and NHS Improvement have invested £10 million to support the delivery of local workforce initiatives or create non-clinical capacity to enable workforce growth. In London, this has included applications for funding for administrative recruitment capacity, rostering and deployment support and career development and supporting software.

Reticulating Splines