Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many midwives who started working in the NHS in England in the last ten years stopped working for the NHS after i) one, ii) two, iii) three and iv) five years.

Staff working in the National Health Service can leave active service, or undertake planned breaks in service, for a wide range of reasons, for example for further training, for periods of maternity or paternity leave, for career breaks, or to move to services in other regions of the United Kingdom, and when leaving NHS employment may be moving to wider health and social care sector roles. This means an assessment of the length of employment to date of staff leaving active service in the NHS may not reflect the rate of staff exiting the NHS completely. The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) publishes statistics as part of its biannual registration data reports on the number of midwives leaving the professional register by time length of time since first registration with the NMC. This information is included in the worksheet “Time-leavers” in the file “UK permanent register tables”, at the following link:

https://www.nmc.org.uk/about-us/reports-and-accounts/registration-statistics/

This data gives a picture of midwives who are relinquishing their licence to practice completely and shows no evidence over the past six years of increasing rates of leavers with between one and five years since initial registration.