Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that adequate levels of staffing are maintained throughout the NHS to protect patient safety.

Appropriate staffing levels are an important element of the Care Quality Commission’s registration regime. It is the responsibility of individual National Health Service health and care employers to have staffing arrangements in place that deliver safe and effective care. This includes recruiting the staff needed to support these levels and meet local needs.

As part of the NHS People Plan, NHS Improvement and Health Education England are considering how best to support the NHS in ensuring it has access to the staff it needs across England. This has focused on areas such as retaining nurses already employed; supporting their existing nursing workforce in areas such as flexible working; investing in nursing staff’s Continuous Professional Development; and increasing undergraduate supply through attracting more students to study nursing.

The University and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) reported that applicants to study nursing have increased by 4% compared to the same period last year.

NHS England and NHS Improvement working with Health Education England are also delivering a major communication campaign ‘We are the NHS’. The campaign aims to reduce vacancy rates across the NHS, with a focus on the nursing profession. There has been a strong focus on recruitment to courses starting in September 2019. From September 2019, a further campaign has been launched to encourage UCAS applications to the January 15 deadline for nursing courses starting in September 2020.

The NHS Ambassadors scheme encourages people working and/or studying in healthcare to volunteer one hour per year to speak in schools about their roles or participate in careers events and activities.

Through the interim People Plan, during 2019/20 we will focus on increasing applications to undergraduate AHP education, particularly in the shortage professions of therapeutic radiography, podiatry, orthoptics and prosthetics/orthotics, and developing Allied Health Professionals faculties to work with healthcare providers to identify how to expand clinical placement activity.

Our ongoing 25% expansion of medical school places in England will see an additional 1,500 new medical school places for United Kingdom domestic students. The extra places have been distributed in geographic areas where there have been fewer training places per unit population.