Asked by: Chris Heaton-Harris (Conservative - Daventry)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, whether his Department has plans to change the workforce requirements for learning disability nurses.
Answered by Ben Gummer
Health Education England (HEE) was established to deliver a better healthcare workforce for England and using all available data is accountable for ensuring that we have a National Health Service workforce in the right numbers, with the right skills, values and behaviours to respond to the current and future needs of patients.
HEE has been working with Skills for Care, Skills for Health and national transforming care partners to deliver a comprehensive workforce strategy to transform services for people with a learning disability, autism and/or behaviour that challenges to make significant and lasting improvements to their care and lives.
HEE has developed and made available a number of enabling tools and resources that can be utilised throughout Transforming Care Partnership including:
― a Learning Disability Skills and Competency Framework which adopts a competency based approach to workforce planning and development;
― a series of role templates to support the development of community and enhanced community teams; and
― HEE Learning Disability Expert Reference Group Chaired by Baroness Hollins is exploring the career framework opportunities within health and social care for the development of new roles and education and training pathway.
Asked by: Chris Heaton-Harris (Conservative - Daventry)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many student training places there were in England for learning disability nursing in each of the last five years.
Answered by Ben Gummer
The following table shows the number of pre-registration learning disability nurse places that were available for each year since 2012/13.
Learning disability nursing | 2012/13 | 2013/14 | 2014/15 | 2015/16 | 2016/17 |
Planned | 612 | 628 | 653 | 664 | 638 |
Source: multi professional education and training budget monitoring returns
Asked by: Chris Heaton-Harris (Conservative - Daventry)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department has taken to encourage students to train as learning disability nurses.
Answered by Ben Gummer
In January 2016 the Health Education England Learning Disability Programme supported Health Careers in a two-week Learning Disability Nursing promotion with a significant increase in web page and twitter activity.
In February 2016 a learning disability leadership signposting page was launched and the campaign #inspiringleadersinLD will feature a series of short video clips of inspiring learning disability nurses in a variety of roles. It is anticipated this campaign will raise profile of a career in learning disability nursing amongst the current learning disability workforce.
Asked by: Chris Heaton-Harris (Conservative - Daventry)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, if he will make it his policy that there should be a learning disability liaison nurse in every acute hospital in England.
Answered by Ben Gummer
Staffing levels are the responsibility of National Health Service organisations, which must make sure the number of staff and skill mix of the workforce, reflects patient care needs and local requirements. It is therefore up to NHS trusts to make decisions about employing learning disability nurses.
The Strengthening the Commitment: The report of the UK Modernising Learning Disability Nursing Review (2012) centred on strengthening the capacity, capability, quality and leadership of the learning disabilities nursing profession to ensure that people with learning disabilities have access to the expert nursing care they need. The Department has set up a Strengthening the Commitment Implementation Group in England to take forward the recommendations including the employment of learning disability nurses within acute hospitals.
Asked by: Chris Heaton-Harris (Conservative - Daventry)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, for what reasons the age at which the death of people with learning disabilities is classified as premature has been set at 60 in the draft NHS Outcomes Framework.
Answered by Alistair Burt
The Department worked with Public Health England (PHE) and the confidential inquiry into premature deaths of people with learning disabilities (CIPOLD) team at the Norah Fry Centre, University of Bristol to define the learning disability mortality indicator in the NHS Outcomes Framework. The placeholder indicator was set at age 60 based on the findings of the CIPOLD at the time which identified the mean age of death in people with learning disability as 60 years old.
The Department, NHS England, PHE and the Norah Fry Centre are currently reviewing the definition of the indicator to establish if there is evidence to support it being redefined and to establish a robust and stable data source in order for the indicator to be reported and measured.
Asked by: Chris Heaton-Harris (Conservative - Daventry)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what the reasons are for the time taken to inform families involved in Selective Dorsal Rhizotomy procedures that funding for those procedures will cease.
Answered by Jane Ellison
NHS England has commissioned Selective dorsal rhizotomy (SDR) procedures as part of its Commissioning through Evaluation (CtE) programme.
CtE schemes run in areas where the current evidence base on clinical and cost effectiveness of a particular treatment is insufficient to support routine funding, and where further research is unlikely to be forthcoming. In these circumstances, NHS England identifies funding for a CtE scheme to gather and support a review of the national clinical commissioning policy position. Each CtE scheme is funded on a time-limited basis, in just a small number of selected participating centres across England, with strict patient selection criteria.
The CtE programme is supported by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, which supports NHS England to identify the total number of patients that need to be treated under the scheme to answer the evaluation questions agreed. Schemes stop once the total planned number of patients has been treated and the data analysis can be concluded. In the case of the SDR scheme it is likely that the last patients will be treated by spring 2016.
The information provided directly by NHS England to stakeholders and participating centres in the SDR scheme has been consistently clear about the time limited nature of CtE and that the funding did not present a change to the current commissioning position of the treatment not being routinely funded by the NHS.
NHS England will continue to work closely with participating centres to ensure that messages are as clear as possible to families who may have wished to consider this treatment option.
Asked by: Chris Heaton-Harris (Conservative - Daventry)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, for what reasons funding for Selective Dorsal Rhizotomy is due to cease in March 2016.
Answered by Jane Ellison
NHS England has commissioned Selective dorsal rhizotomy (SDR) procedures as part of its Commissioning through Evaluation (CtE) programme.
CtE schemes run in areas where the current evidence base on clinical and cost effectiveness of a particular treatment is insufficient to support routine funding, and where further research is unlikely to be forthcoming. In these circumstances, NHS England identifies funding for a CtE scheme to gather and support a review of the national clinical commissioning policy position. Each CtE scheme is funded on a time-limited basis, in just a small number of selected participating centres across England, with strict patient selection criteria.
The CtE programme is supported by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, which supports NHS England to identify the total number of patients that need to be treated under the scheme to answer the evaluation questions agreed. Schemes stop once the total planned number of patients has been treated and the data analysis can be concluded. In the case of the SDR scheme it is likely that the last patients will be treated by spring 2016.
The information provided directly by NHS England to stakeholders and participating centres in the SDR scheme has been consistently clear about the time limited nature of CtE and that the funding did not present a change to the current commissioning position of the treatment not being routinely funded by the NHS.
NHS England will continue to work closely with participating centres to ensure that messages are as clear as possible to families who may have wished to consider this treatment option.
Asked by: Chris Heaton-Harris (Conservative - Daventry)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many Serious Incident Investigations have been undertaken by Northampton General Hospital into incidents involving stillbirths in each year since 2010.
Answered by Dan Poulter
It is the responsibility of care providers to investigate all serious incidents that take place under their jurisdiction.
Data from the Strategic Executive Information System (STEIS) shows that a total of five serious incidents involving still births were reported by Northampton General Hospital since 2010. Where a small number of cases exist the Department is unable to provide further details as the disclosure of such information could breach an individual’s confidentiality.
Asked by: Chris Heaton-Harris (Conservative - Daventry)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many serious incident investigations have been undertaken by the NHS into incidents involving stillbirths in each year since 2010.
Answered by Dan Poulter
It is the responsibility of care providers to investigate all serious incidents that take place under their jurisdiction.
Data was extracted from the Strategic Executive Information System (STEIS)* and the table below shows that a total of 955 serious incidents involving still births were reported in England since 2010. Of these 829 are recorded as ‘closed’ following the conclusion of an investigation.
Serious incidents reported in England to the STEIS database as “Maternity Services - Intrapartum death” or “Intrauterine death” | |||||||
| Calendar Year | Total | |||||
STEIS incident type | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | up to 25 February 2015 |
|
Maternity Services - Intrapartum death | 43 | 70 | 43 | 55 | 54 | 4 | 269 |
Maternity Services - Intrauterine death | 64 | 113 | 140 | 171 | 181 | 17 | 686 |
Total | 107 | 183 | 183 | 226 | 235 | 21 | 955 |
*STEIS includes two categories ‘Maternity Services - Intrapartum death’, which encompass stillbirth that appeared to have occurred intrapartum (i.e. during labour) and ‘Maternity Services - Intrauterine death’, which describes death in the womb detected before labour commenced. Extracted data describes the numbers of serious incidents reported under these categories.
Asked by: Chris Heaton-Harris (Conservative - Daventry)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what the ratio of midwives to patients in the NHS was in each year since 2010.
Answered by Dan Poulter
The ratio of midwives to patients is not collected centrally. Annual data showing the ratio of births to midwives is collected by the Health and Social Care Information Centre and attached below for the years 2010 – 2013.
Data as at 30 September each year
| 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 |
Registered full-time equivalent (FTE) midwives |
20,126 |
20,519 |
20,935 |
21,284 |
Number of all births |
690,513 |
691,739
|
697,598 |
667,620 |
Ratio (births per FTE midwife) |
34.3
|
33.7 |
33.3 |
31.4 |
There were 21,670 registered midwives on 30 September 2014 however the ratio of (all) births per FTE midwife cannot be provided as the birth data for 2014 is not yet available.
There has been an increase of 2,231 (11.1%) FTE qualified midwives since May 2010.