Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment has been made by (a) NICE, (b) Health Education England and (c) his Department of the additional number of full-time equivalent nurses needed for NHS trusts to meet NICE safe staffing guidance.

We now have over 317,500 full-time equivalent nurses, midwives and health visitors working in the National Health Service; this is 7,500 more than in 2010 and the highest level in the history of the NHS.

Safe staffing is not simply about numbers; safe staffing needs to take account of the local circumstances, skill mix and case mix to ensure the right staffing levels are available to deliver high quality and safe patient care.

To date, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has published two pieces of safe staffing guidance on nursing in adult inpatient wards in acute hospitals and midwife staffing in maternity settings.

The Department has not made any assessment of the additional numbers of staff required to meet the NICE safe staffing guidelines. It is for individual providers to consider the implications of the guidance for their staffing levels and NICE publishes a range of resources to support implementation of its guidance locally, including a resource impact commentary and a baseline assessment tool. It also endorses tools produced by other organisations that can support implementation of its guidance.

Health Education England (HEE) is responsible for ensuring sufficient staff are available to fill the jobs created, through its investment in education and training. The views of providers on the nature and number of the future workforce they intend to employ is central to HEE’s planning for how it invests its training resources.

HEE has increased the number of training commissions for adult nursing, representing a 9% increase on the previous year. For 2015-16, HEE plan to continue the growth in nursing numbers to meet safe staffing levels by commissioning 555 additional training posts, a further increase of 4.2%.This means in the two years HEE will have grown adult nursing training places by 13.6%.

The resources for NICE’s guidance on inpatient wards in acute hospitals are published on NICE’s website at:

http://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/sg1/resources