Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to recruit additional nurses with a specialism in learning (a) difficulties and (b) disabilities.

It is the responsibility of individual health and care employers to have staffing arrangements in place that deliver safe and effective care. This includes recruiting the workforce required to support these levels and meet local needs.

The National Health Service Long Term Plan, published 7 January 2019, made clear the importance of moving care into the community, and the government’s commitment to achieving this. We know that to deliver this, we need to have the right community services workforce with the skills, knowledge and capacity to meet current and future needs of an ageing population with more complex needs.

My Rt. hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care asked Baroness Harding, Chair of NHS Improvement, to oversee the delivery of a Workforce Implementation Plan to be published in the spring.

Health Education England (HEE) is leading a review of community nursing to better understand the skills and knowledge required within a contemporary community nursing workforce, both for now and into the future.

HEE is also proactively encouraging more people to train to become learning disability nurses through a number of initiatives, including:

- An accelerated postgraduate nurse programme for mental health and learning disabilities to attract high-achieving graduates into a career in nursing; and

- Ensuring nurses in other sectors have the opportunities to develop their skills further to work in learning disability nursing.

Announced on 9 May 2018, students who commenced loan funded postgraduate pre-registration nursing courses in the 2018/19 academic year will be eligible for a ‘golden hello’ payment of £10,000 once they have graduated and go on to work in learning disability, mental health or district nursing. Payments will be made to these graduates once they take up in employment in the health and care sector in England.

Working with the NHS and the university sector, the Government is finalising the most effective way to administer and introduce the scheme and will set out details in due course.