Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether the 47,000 retired doctors and nurses who volunteered to help the NHS in the first wave of the covid-19 outbreak are volunteering to help in the second wave of the outbreak; and whether those staff will be deployed to Nightingale hospitals.

The former healthcare professionals who came forward to help the National Health Service in the first wave of the COVID-19 outbreak have wide ranging skills and experience and have been employed across health and social care - for example within NHS 111, secondary care, mental health and community services. More recently, efforts have focused on matching these former healthcare professionals to the covid vaccination programme.

Data on the numbers of those on the temporary registers who are employed is not collected centrally. Thousands of these former healthcare professionals remain in touch with NHS England and NHS Improvement’s regional ‘Bring Back Staff’ teams and are available for deployment to a range of clinical settings and programmes, including Nightingale hospitals.