Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what actions they are taking to ensure that patients staying overnight in hospitals always have access to professional nursing support.

Appropriate staffing levels are a core element of the Care Quality Commission’s (CQC) registration regime. All providers of regulated activities must be registered with the CQC and meet the registration requirements. The 16 safety and quality requirements include a requirement to take steps to ensure that there are sufficient numbers of suitably qualified, skilled and experienced staff employed at all times.

In July 2016, the National Quality Board published 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.

There are over 12,100 (7.5%) more nurses on our wards, acute, elderly and general, since May 2010.

A copy of 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 is attached.