Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the implications for his policies conclusion of paragraph 6 of the Queen's Nursing Institute Report, 2020 Vision: 5 Years On, published in June 2014, that community nursing teams do not have capacity to accommodate any increase in demand for their services.

District nursing services involves qualified district nurses leading and supporting multi-disciplinary teams that include staff nurses, community nurses and healthcare assistants working with other professions such as general practicioners and Allied Health Professionals. Staffing levels are the responsibility of providers, who must make sure the skill mix of the workforce reflects patient care needs and local requirements, giving due consideration to the experience and capabilities of staff.

The Government is investing in the current and future workforce to have capacity and capability to provide services in a whole range of settings. To ensure that we have an adequate supply of highly skilled district nurses, Health Education England has expanded the number of training places for district nurses for 2014-15 by 431 places, an increase of 7%.

Health Education England is also taking a number of other measures to increase the number of district nurses, including working with the Higher Education Sector to provide easy access to courses to enable nurses employed in other areas to switch to working in the community, reduce attrition and support retention, increasing the accessibility of practice placements for student nurses, profiling community nursing as an attractive career option and encourage nurses whose registration has lapsed and who have left the National Health Service to return.

NHS England is in the second year of a programme to deliver on the six areas of actions linked to the implementation of Compassion in Practice nursing and midwifery strategy, published in December 2012. In particular, Action Area five is about ‘ensuring we have the right staff with the right skills in the right place’ and one of its overarching objectives is to work with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence to establish adequate and appropriate staffing levels in all care settings, including community nursing. Within this is a specific piece of work with key stakeholders, including provider organisations, Health Education England and the Queens Nursing Institute, to develop a tool for workforce planning and staffing levels for community nursing based on population need; a tool that supports strategic planning as well as operational deployment of the workforce and that simultaneously considers the needs of integrated service redesign.