National Health Service: Nurses

Baroness Jolly Excerpts

Tuesday 8th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Manzoor]

My Lords, I agree with much of what the noble Lord said. There is a shortage of nurses in the NHS: 41,000 vacancies, as he rightly identified. To put that into context, our policies have enabled the NHS to put more than 13,400 more nurses on our wards since 2010. We are not complacent. We have increased nurse training places by 25% from September 2018. To reassure the noble Lord, there are more than 52,000 nurses in training. Although there are more applications than places, we know that we need to do much more work with universities. On the NHS 10-year plan, the noble Lord rightly identified that the training budget has not been set yet. We will do that by the spring. My noble friend Lady Harding is taking a quick look at the forward plan, the type of vacancies and how we can recruit more nurses into the NHS.

[Baroness Jolly (LD)]

My Lords, it was encouraging to see in yesterday’s plan a commitment to an extra 5,000 funded clinical placements for trainee nurses from the next academic year, 2019-20. Can the Government indicate when the funding for those places will be guaranteed? Are we certain that training places are available to absorb this welcome jump in demand?

[Baroness Manzoor]

There were 22,200 acceptances to study nursing and midwifery in 2018, compared with 22,575 in 2017, which we estimate will increase the final number of students on nursing and midwifery courses by a further 650. The numbers are coming through, but we recognise that we need radical campaigns to ensure that we attract more people into nursing, particularly in the community.