Emma Reynolds – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Emma Reynolds on 2015-11-26.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many nurses’ training places were available in each region in each year since 2009; how many (a) agency nurses and (b) nurses from outside the UK were used by the NHS in each year since 2009; and what the cost to the NHS was of both such categories of nurses in each of those years.

Ben Gummer

Non-medical training numbers are collected as part of the quarterly multi professional education and training budget monitoring returns that are submitted to the Department by Health Education England (HEE). Prior to the establishment of HEE in 2013/14 these were submitted to the Department by the Strategic Health Authority (SHA) as part of their quarterly Financial Information Management Systems (FIMS) monitoring returns. The table below shows the number of nurse training places available in each SHA from 2009/10 to 2012/13.

2009/10	2010/11	2011/12	2012/13
NHS North East	1,095	1,045	1,000	992
NHS North West	3,630	3,358	3,082	3,066
NHS Yorkshire and Humber	2,299	2,278	1,848	1,805
NHS East Midlands	1,735	1,660	1,462	1,430
NHS West Midlands	2,597	2,557	2,102	2,102
NHS East of England	1,889	1,717	1,536	1,494
NHS London	3,992	3,695	3,401	3,088
NHS South East Coast	1,335	1,281	1,169	1,123
NHS South Central	1,175	1,237	1,108	1,153
NHS South West	1,590	1499	1,361	1,293
Total planned	21,337	20,327	18,069	17,546

Source: SHA quarterly FIMS monitoring returns

The following table details the information collected by HEE in relation to available nurse training places from 2013/14 to 2015/16, broken down by Local Education and Training Boards (LETB).

The disaggregated data for 2013/14 is not held within the format requested. The published national workforce plan for 2013/14 stated that there would be 18,009 training commissions available for nursing.

LETB Region	2013/14	2014/15	2015/16
North East		1,105	1,089
North West		3,415	3,322
Yorkshire and Humber		2,010	2,059
West Midlands		2,157	2,192
East Midlands		1,613	1,661
East of England		1,783	2,015
North West London		820	917
North, Central and East London		1,201	1,280
South London		1,138	1,171
Kent, Surrey and Sussex		1,126	1,209
Thames Valley		768	795
Wessex		941	1,011
South West		1,368	1,432
Total	18,009	19,445	20,153

Source: Multi-professional education and training budget monitoring returns

The Department does not collect data centrally on the number of agency nurses working in the NHS. This information may be held locally at Trust level.

The Department started to collect financial data from NHS trusts and foundation trusts in respect of net temporary and agency staffing costs specifically from 2013/14. Available data on spending nationally on all agency staff in England is set out in the table below. We are not able to separately identify total spending with agencies on nurses from centrally held data.

Total cost to the NHS of temporary staff in 2013/14 and 2014/15

	2013/14 £000s	2014/15 £000s
Total NHS Providers	2,605,378	3,355,723

Source: Department of Health Annual Report and Accounts 2014/15

The Department does not hold information on the total cost to the NHS of nurses from outside of the United Kingdom working in the service. The information provided in the table below shows the number of declared non-British nurses working in the NHS in England dating back to 2009. Non-British nursing numbers working in the NHS in England covers hospital and community health services in the NHS but not primary care.

	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014
Non-British	40,034	41,642	40,911	40,030	40,330	43,258
Proportion of non-British nurses as % of the nursing workforce	14.4%	14.3%	13.8%	13.3%	13.0%	13.5%

Source: Health and Social Care Information Centre.