Speeches

Mark Hendrick – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Mark Hendrick on 2014-06-17.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many registered nurses were made redundant by each NHS health trust in England in 2013.

Dr Daniel Poulter

The number (Headcount basis) of Qualified Nursing Staff made redundant, from National Health Service trusts, during 2013 is estimated in the attached table.

In November 2013 there was a record full time equivalent number of qualified nursing, midwifery and health visiting staff in the NHS of 312,900.

The 489 redundancies represent just 0.14 % of the total Qualified Nursing workforce in Hospitals and Community Health Services.

The data used in this reply has been extracted from the Electronic Staff Record (ESR) Data Warehouse which is a monthly snap shot of the live ESR system. This is the Human Resources and payroll system that covers all NHS employees other than those working in General Practice, Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Chesterfield Royal Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, and organisations to which functions have been transferred, such as local authorities. ESR was fully rolled out across the NHS in April 2008. The ESR data used in this response is not centrally validated and its reliability is subject to local coding practice.

Redundancies are identified as those individuals with a reason for leaving of either voluntary or compulsory redundancy. Only those individuals coded as Qualified Nurses, Midwives or Health Visitors are included in the figures. Only redundancies from NHS Trusts are included in these figures, it is possible that Qualified Nurses were also made redundant from other NHS bodies.

ESR reports based on the current organisation structure. This means that if organisations merged during 2013 it is possible that redundancies from, now defunct, organisations are recorded as being from the newly created organisation.