Nurses
(asked on 23rd November 2016) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the number of nurses who will be available for deployment in the NHS for each of the years from 2016–17 to 2020–21, and what levels of in-work attrition are used to calculate future nurse numbers over this period.
Health Education England (HEE) have produced a higher and lower range of scenarios for future nurse supply, which is shown in the following table.
The figures provided here represent those in the published ‘Workforce Plan for England 2016/17’.
Range of future forecast supply up to March 2021
Forecast supply for all nurse branches | 2015 staff in post baseline | 2016 increase in forecast supply |
Lower scenario full time equivalents (FTEs) | 294,094 | 2,732 |
Higher scenario (FTEs) | 294,094 | 10,194 |
Forecast supply for all nurse branches | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 |
Lower scenario full time equivalents (FTEs) | 3,183 | 3,707 | 3,957 | 2,975 |
Higher scenario (FTEs) | 18,143 | 26,148 | 33,870 | 40,335 |
Source: Health Education England
These forecasts are calculated based on the current stock of staff, and flows into and out of the existing workforce, including retirements, outturn from education and other joiners and leavers from the National Health Service workforce. The range of scenarios comes from the variation in the assumed levels of ‘other’ joiners and leavers as extracted by HEE from the Electronic Staff Record (for example, the treatment of leavers and joiners classed as 'Unknown’). In the lower scenario, there are more ‘other’ types of leaver (6.3%) each year than ‘other’ types of joiner (3.9%). In the higher scenario, ‘other’ types of joiners and leavers are in broadly in balance (at around 3%).
The lower forecast scenario acts to highlight the importance of the system acting to improve staff retention alongside efforts to reduce course attrition and improve employment rates.