Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will reinstate the Nursing Now programme to deliver nursing and midwifery training in developing countries.

The UK government is committed to efforts to strengthen the global healthcare workforce - including through nurse and midwife training in low and lower-middle income countries - as part of a wider health systems strengthening approach. This is laid out in the FCDO's recently published Health Systems Strengthening and Ending Preventable Deaths of Mothers, Babies and Children Approach Papers. We do not have current plans to reinstate funding for the Nursing Now campaign after the seismic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the UK economy forced the Government to take tough but necessary decisions, including reducing Official Development Assistance spending from 0.7 to 0.5% of Gross National Income.

We will continue to support efforts to strengthen national healthcare workforces through our bilateral programming and our support to large multi-country programmes such as the Global Financing Facility, the World Health Organization, and our £1.4 billion contribution to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria (2020-2024). The Global Fund invests around $1billion per year in health systems strengthening, the majority of which supports human resources for health. The FCDO has seconded a Human Resources for Health Adviser to the Global Fund to help to maximise the impact of this significant investment.