Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of bringing forward legislative proposals to ensure safe staffing levels are maintained in the NHS.

Appropriate staffing levels are already a core element of the Care Quality Commission’s (CQC’s) registration regime underpinned by legislation. All providers of regulated activities must be registered with the CQC and meet the registration requirements. The 16 safety and quality requirements set out in the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014 include a requirement for the deployment of sufficient numbers of suitably qualified, competent, skilled and experienced persons.

In July 2016, the National Quality Board published the report, “Supporting NHS providers to deliver the right staff, with the right skills, in the right place at the right time: Safe, Sustainable and productive staffing”. This safe staffing improvement resource provides an updated set of expectations for nursing and midwifery care staffing, to help National Health Service provider boards make local decisions that will support the delivery of high quality care for patients within the available staffing resource. It sets out the key principles and tools that provider boards should use to measure and improve their use of staffing resources to ensure safe, sustainable and productive services.

The report can be accessed at:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/ourwork/part-rel/nqb/

NHS Improvement is also leading the national programme to develop and deliver NHS safe staffing improvement resources for specific care settings, including acute inpatients and children’s services.

We have not sought a prescriptive approach to staffing levels, for example by setting minimum levels of staffing for all services, because minimum staffing numbers and ratios do not take account of the local circumstances, skill mix or case mix. Such an approach can lead to a lack of flexibility or organisations seeking to achieve staffing levels only in accordance with a minimum ratio.