Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment she has made of the potential merits of establishing nationally agreed minimum staffing levels for maternity and neonatal staff.

The Department of Health and Social Care have provided almost £450,000 to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) to develop a new workforce planning tool to improve how maternity units calculate their medical staffing requirements, to better support families and babies.

The tool will be freely available to NHS trusts across the country in the next year and will provide maternity staff with a new methodology that calculates the numbers, skill sets, and grades of medical staff required within individual maternity units based on local needs. It will help identify ways of working to better utilise the current workforce and help gain a better understanding of the factors which promote safety and positive culture within maternity teams and how these can be rolled out nationally.

The NICE endorsed Birth Rate Plus tool similarly allows midwifery units to calculate their staffing with the acuity app assesses real time staffing needs based on clinical needs of women and babies.

We have also commissioned the Long Term Workforce plan which looks at short, medium and long term demand, including projections, and will set out actions to reduce supply gaps, improve retention and boost productivity.