Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what progress his Department has made on increasing (a) recruitment and (b) retention of (i) doctors and (ii) nurses.

‘We are the NHS: People Plan for 2020/2021 – action for us all’ sets out actions to expand and develop our workforce by retaining staff for longer and building on the renewed interest in National Health Service careers. The next phase of the NHS People Plan will focus on workforce growth and ensuring it has the right skills mix in place for a flexible and modern NHS.

Through its ‘looking after our people - retention programme’, which launched in the summer of 2020, NHS England and NHS Improvement are supporting employers and managers to value, support and retain their staff, both clinical and non-clinical. This is achieved through a new employer portal of guidance, best practice and direct support for systems and organisations across each of the domains of the people promise. Flexible working and the health and wellbeing of staff remain a key focus of the retention initiatives.

Over the year to September 2020 the number of nurses has increased by 13,313 and the number of NHS Hospital and Community Health Service doctors by 6,030 NHS Digital published leaver rates and since September 2019 the leaver rate has fallen from 10.9% to 9.6% for nurses and 6.7% to 6.1% for doctors, excluding junior doctors.