Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many and what proportion of full time equivalent general nurses become full time equivalent specialist nurses after accreditation.

The information on the number and proportion of nurses who become specialist nurses after accreditation is not held centrally. The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) sets the standards for education for the nursing profession. There is though no regulator required post registration educational preparation for most specialist nursing roles. An employer would be responsible for creating the number of specialist nursing posts they require, based on population need. It would be expected that an organisation would develop registered nurses into specialist roles, with support from regional funding. This funding enables the development of, for example, advanced practitioners and nurse prescribers.

The NMC do publish data on registered Specialist Community Public Health Practitioners who hold specific recordable qualifications. This will not include all postgraduate training and nurses may be employed in a range of settings inside and outside of the English National Health Service. The data is available at the following link:

https://www.nmc.org.uk/about-us/reports-and-accounts/registration-statistics/

The NHS Long Term Workforce Plan set out that the NHS would focus on expanding the number of clinicians, including nurses, who train to take up enhanced and advanced roles, and work as part of multidisciplinary teams that have the right skills to meet the changing needs of patients. Supporting clinicians to train as enhanced and advanced practitioners will also help to retain staff by offering a valuable career progression opportunity.

The NHS Long Term Workforce Plan sets the ambition of training at least 3,000 advanced practitioners in 2023/24 and 2024/25, and increasing the number in training further to 5,000 a year by 2028/29. By 2031/32, we expect that more than 6,300 clinicians will start training to become advanced practitioners each year.