Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Jeremy Hunt and Justin Tomlinson(6 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Hunt
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to make that point. Nurses are, in fact, on the Home Office’s tier 2 shortage occupation list, and they will remain so for as long as we need them to do so. The bigger issue is that for a long time we have relied on being able to import as many doctors and nurses from the EU as we need to, and that has meant that we have not trained enough people ourselves. That is bad for EU countries and for our own young people.
Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)
2. What steps are being taken to increase the supply of doctors and nurses in the NHS.
Mr William Wragg (Hazel Grove) (Con)
12. What steps his Department is taking to increase the number of doctors and nurses working in the NHS.
The Secretary of State for Health (Mr Jeremy Hunt)
Last year this Government announced one of the biggest expansions of medical training places in the history of the NHS, involving funding 1,500 additional medical school places every year—of which 500 start this September—and reforms that will enable universities to offer up to 10,000 additional nurse training places every year.
Justin Tomlinson
Swindon clinical commissioning group secured pilot funding for its successful video campaign to recruit additional GPs to fill vacancies in our local community. Will the Secretary of State commit to exploring further innovative ways to match newly qualified staff to vacancies that they might not have considered?
Mr Hunt
My hon. Friend makes a really important point. In parts of the country, GP shortages have been successfully addressed as the CCG has done in Swindon. An important part of this is persuading people who go into medicine that general practice is one of the most exciting and rapidly changing parts of medicine today. We have seen a 9% increase in the number of medical students choosing to go into general practice since 2015.
NHS Shared Business Services
Debate between Jeremy Hunt and Justin Tomlinson(6 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Mr Hunt
Just to be clear, what I said was that to date there is no evidence of any patients being harmed, but the process of proper clinical review, with multidisciplinary teams, will take until the end of the year. We have to do this properly to get to the answer. We hope that it remains the case that no patients were harmed, but we will not know that until the end of the year. However, throughout this whole process we have prioritised the highest risk cases and made sure that they get the most urgent attention.
Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)
Following this failure, I welcome the Secretary of State’s decisive action in bringing in the national incident team. How will we learn the lessons and share the best practice, as discovered by that team?
Mr Hunt
The NHS is extremely good at responding to crises and emergencies, as tragically we have found out in recent months. This is an example of the NHS doing a very good job when it realises the scale of the problem. For me, the lessons that really need to be learned are about not the response to the issue but the assurance processes that allowed the problem to happen in the first place.