Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether NHS England has undertaken an assessment of the potential impact of voluntary redundancy programmes across Devon NHS trusts on regional healthcare resilience and patient safety.

The National Health Service landscape needs to continually evolve to ensure it can provide high quality patient care.

Any decision to offer a voluntary exit scheme is a matter for local employers and will be based on local service and staffing needs.

Decisions about recruitment are a matter for individual NHS employers, who manage this at a local level to ensure they have the staff they need to deliver safe and effective care.

The 10 Year Workforce Plan will ensure the NHS has the right people in the right places, with the right skills to care for patients, when they need it.