Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, for what reasons he has not implemented the recommendation of Sir Robert Francis that the development of safe staffing guidance should be undertaken by NICE rather than NHS England.

Following Sir Robert Francis’ report on Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, the Government has worked with a number of organisations in the National Health Service to ensure that the best evidence and guidance about safe staffing is available to NHS providers and commissioners. The work undertaken by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence has provided an important foundation for the further work now to be led from within NHS England. This work will bring together the focus on safe staffing with the development of new models of care, as set out in the Five Year Forward View.

This approach will help us to build the evidence for what safe staffing looks like in a range of settings. No one size fits all and so the work will take an adaptive approach to setting staffing levels as the NHS continues to innovate and develop new models of care.