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 increase the proportion of ethnic minority nurses at band 8a or above.

The National Health Service is one of the most diverse organisations in this country and we hugely value the contribution that all staff make to delivering care and supporting patients.

On 8 June 2023, NHS England published an Equality Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) improvement plan for the NHS workforce. There has been progress in improving diversity of senior management teams; the total number of ethnic minority staff at very senior manager level has increased by 69.7% since 2018 from 201 to 341.

The EDI plan requires NHS organisations and integrated care boards to create talent management plans to improve diversity of boards and senior roles and to implement plans to widen recruitment opportunities within local communities. This includes a focus on career pathways into the NHS such as apprenticeship programmes and graduate management training schemes.