Asked by: Lord Clark of Windermere (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the answer by Lord O'Shaughnessy on 10 January (HL Deb, col 182), how many of the 10,000 extra nurses on wards are agency nurses.
Answered by Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen
NHS Digital publishes workforce statistics for substantive staff employed by the National Health Service trusts and clinical commissioning groups. Nurses on our wards are coded on the Electronic Staff Record as Acute, Elderly and General Nurses and are a subset of all nurses and health visitors. As at September, NHS Digital data shows there were 14,185 full time equivalent more nurses on our wards than in May 2010. All of these nurses are professionally qualified clinical nurses. As such, none are agency nurses.
Figures are provided as full time equivalent as this is the most accurate measure of service capacity.
Asked by: Lord Clark of Windermere (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what is the latest rate of absence through sickness of NHS staff; and what were the comparable figures for each of the last 20 years.
Answered by Lord O'Shaughnessy
The latest rate of sickness of National Health Service staff is 4.16% (2016/17). Comparable figures from 2009/10, extracted from the Electronic Staff Record (ESR), are shown in the following table and is information collected from ESR by NHS Digital. Sickness absence data collected by the Department before 2009 used a different methodology and are not comparable. Sickness absence figures for 2017/18 will be published in July 2018.
Year | Sickness absence rate (%) |
2009-10 | 4.40 |
2010-11 | 4.16 |
2011-12 | 4.12 |
2012-13 | 4.24 |
2013-14 | 4.06 |
2014-15 | 4.25 |
2015-16 | 4.15 |
2016-17 | 4.16 |
Asked by: Lord Clark of Windermere (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what was the level of bullying reported in the latest NHS Staff Survey; and what were the comparable figures for each of the last 20 years.
Answered by Lord O'Shaughnessy
Employers are responsible for tackling bullying and harassment of staff. The Department is not complacent and Ministers are committed to meeting their manifesto commitment in tackling rates of bullying and harassment which are far too high. To that end, the Department is working with employers and unions in partnership to prioritise actions including the importance of line manager training, continuing to raise the profile of the issue and using Care Quality Commission inspections to assess progress, as we enter the second year of the national Social Partnership Forum’s Tackling Bullying in the NHS: A collective call to action published in December 2016. A copy of Tackling Bullying in the NHS is attached.
NHS England has provided the information and statistics which are attached due to the size of the data. The NHS Staff Survey was first undertaken in 2003. Questions about harassment, bullying and abuse have been included each year since then although it is not always possible to compare results from different years due to amendments to questions or survey method. We have, therefore, put together figures from the Staff Survey in different groups i.e. figures for 2012 – 2016 are comparable but not with other groupings; similarly, those for 2010/11, 2004-9 and 2003. The results from 2012 to 2016 are comparable.
Asked by: Lord Clark of Windermere (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask Her Majesty's Government how many doctors were employed in the NHS on (1) 1 May 2010, (2) 1 May 2015, and (3) the most recent date for which figures are available.
Answered by Lord O'Shaughnessy
NHS Digital publishes workforce statistics and a table showing full time equivalent and headcount figures for Hospital and Community Health Service (HCHS) doctors and qualified nurses and health visitors working in National Health Service trusts and clinical commissioning groups from 31 May 2010 to 30 September 2017 is attached due to the size of the data.
Qualified nurses are those identified on the electronic staff record as nurses and health visitors but does not include midwives. Doctors includes all HCHS doctor grades including all junior doctors.
Asked by: Lord Clark of Windermere (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask Her Majesty's Government how many full-time equivalent doctors were employed in the NHS in each year since May 2010.
Answered by Lord O'Shaughnessy
NHS Digital publishes workforce statistics and a table showing full time equivalent and headcount figures for Hospital and Community Health Service (HCHS) doctors and qualified nurses and health visitors working in National Health Service trusts and clinical commissioning groups from 31 May 2010 to 30 September 2017 is attached due to the size of the data.
Qualified nurses are those identified on the electronic staff record as nurses and health visitors but does not include midwives. Doctors includes all HCHS doctor grades including all junior doctors.
Asked by: Lord Clark of Windermere (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask Her Majesty's Government how many full-time equivalent qualified nurses were employed in the NHS in each year since May 2010.
Answered by Lord O'Shaughnessy
NHS Digital publishes workforce statistics and a table showing full time equivalent and headcount figures for Hospital and Community Health Service (HCHS) doctors and qualified nurses and health visitors working in National Health Service trusts and clinical commissioning groups from 31 May 2010 to 30 September 2017 is attached due to the size of the data.
Qualified nurses are those identified on the electronic staff record as nurses and health visitors but does not include midwives. Doctors includes all HCHS doctor grades including all junior doctors.
Asked by: Lord Clark of Windermere (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask Her Majesty's Government how many qualified nurses were employed in the NHS in each year since May 2010.
Answered by Lord O'Shaughnessy
NHS Digital publishes workforce statistics and a table showing full time equivalent and headcount figures for Hospital and Community Health Service (HCHS) doctors and qualified nurses and health visitors working in National Health Service trusts and clinical commissioning groups from 31 May 2010 to 30 September 2017 is attached due to the size of the data.
Qualified nurses are those identified on the electronic staff record as nurses and health visitors but does not include midwives. Doctors includes all HCHS doctor grades including all junior doctors.
Asked by: Lord Clark of Windermere (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord O'Shaughnessy on 27 November (HL3070), whether each of the three NHS-approved framework operators for the provision of agency staff to the NHS is publicly owned.
Answered by Lord O'Shaughnessy
NHS Improvement has approved three framework operators for the supply of agency staff within the National Health Service, these are: Crown Commercial Services, the NHS Collaborative Procurement Partnership and Health Trust Europe.
We can confirm that Crown Commercial Services and the NHS Collaborative Procurement Partnership are both publicly owned.
The NHS Collaborative Procurement Partnership is the culmination of the collaborative working of four NHS procurement organisations; NHS Commercial Solutions, East of England NHS Collaborative Procurement Hub, NHS North of England Commercial Procurement Collaborative, and NHS London Procurement Partnership.
We can confirm that Health Trust Europe is owned by Health Care America and is a privately owned company. In line with legal requirements they are hosted by University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust and are fully compliant with all legal obligations required to supply within the NHS.
Asked by: Lord Clark of Windermere (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask Her Majesty's Government which institutions provide undergraduate courses in nursing.
Answered by Lord O'Shaughnessy
Information on all higher education institutes providing undergraduate pre-registration courses in adult, child, mental health and learning disability nursing can be found in the table, which has been attached owing to the size of the data.
Asked by: Lord Clark of Windermere (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what are the names and locations of the agencies registered to supply nurses to NHS trusts in England.
Answered by Lord O'Shaughnessy
Agency rules require that agencies are on NHS Improvement-approved frameworks and these frameworks monitor and approve agencies for supply to trusts. The approved framework operators are Crown Commercial Service, NHS Collaborative Procurement Partnership and Health Trust Europe.
In addition to agencies on approved frameworks, trusts in exceptional patient safety situations can utilise the ‘break glass clause’ and work with an off-framework agency. Using an off-framework agency should be a culmination of a robust escalation process sanctioned by the trust board. Trust boards have primary responsibility for monitoring the local impact of the agency rules and ensuring patient safety.