Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to address the persistent shortages of Registered Nurses in Birmingham’s hospitals as identified by the Care Quality Commission in December.

Individual National Health Service employers carry out their own recruitment to meet their local need.

The Government is committed to delivering 50,000 more nurses by the end of the Parliament and put the NHS on a trajectory to a sustainable long-term supply in future. We have set up a comprehensive work programme to improve retention and support return to practice, invest in and diversify our training pipeline and ethically recruit internationally.

The latest published NHS digital data shows that nurse numbers in NHS Trusts and CCGs have increased by almost 11,100 in the past year.