Iain Wright – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Iain Wright on 2016-01-20.
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department is taking to improve recruitment and retention of embryologists in the NHS in (a) England and (b) the North East.
Ben Gummer
Individual healthcare providers are responsible for ensuring that they have the right level of staffing to provide high quality care to their patients, including embryology services.
Health Education England (HEE) was established in 2012 to ensure the National Health Service has access to the right numbers of staff, at the right time and with the right skills. In doing so, HEE works with key external stakeholders to develop its National Workforce Plan for England which sets out the number of training places it will commission in the year ahead to meet future local need.
HEE will continue to work with its 13 Local Education and Training Boards and others to ensure that there are sufficient healthcare scientists, including embryologists, being trained to meet the future needs of patients.
Currently HEE has 28 reproductive scientists in training (which includes embryology) and are planning a further 11 to start in 2016/17. It takes three years to train a reproductive scientist.
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority have advised that it is not aware of any issues concerning the availability of embryologists in the United Kingdom.
