Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the implications for his policies of the fall in the number of applications to nursing courses in the UK in 2017.

The Department is working with relevant bodies across health and education to monitor the effects of the healthcare funding reforms, including the impact on application numbers on all the professions affected. We are working with universities to ensure more people continue to apply to nurse training programmes.

The Department is also working with its arm’s length bodies on a number of actions to increase recruitment and retention of the nursing workforce, including applications to nursing courses.

NHS England, with the support of the Department and Health Education England (HEE), has launched a major advertising campaign, aimed at encouraging recruitment to the National Health Service, retaining the existing workforce, and promoting the possibility of a return to the workforce for those who have previously worked in the NHS. The campaign has a strong focus on nursing, and builds upon HEE’s #KnowAboutNursing campaign, which has been running since May of this year.