Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent steps his Department has taken to increase the number of NHS staff in Hertfordshire.

The 2020 NHS People Plan focuses on improving the retention of National Health Service staff through a programme to support return to practice, invest in and diversify the training pipeline and ethically recruit internationally. There are currently over 9,600 more nurses and almost 4,100 additional doctors working in NHS trusts and clinical commissioning groups since last year. We are on schedule to meet the commitment to recruit an additional 50,000 nurses.

Local National Health Service trusts are responsible for managing own staffing levels and for recruiting the appropriate number of health professionals required to meet local service need. In the East and North Hertfordshire NHS Trust the number of full time equivalent (FTE) staff has increased by 1,065 or 23.1% since May 2010. This is due to an increase of approximately 200 staff at the Trust following changes in the hosting of pathology laboratory services in the East of England in July 2017. In the West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust, the number of FTE staff has increased by 1,410 or 42.9% since May 2010.