Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust — House of Commons, 2016-03-21
Topic: Health
Benedict Gummer (Conservative, Centre-right): I shall certainly impress that upon NHS Improvement, which will be taking over the functions of the NHS Trust Development Authority in the next few days. I expect that it will keep an even beadier eye on the quality of management than has been the case so far. It will do so under the watchful eye of Jim Mackey, its chief executive, who ran one of the best hospitals not only in England but in the world. He is now running NHS Improvement and I know that he will be able to provide the support that the hon. Lady wishes to see. I will tell him later this week about the discussion that we have had tonight and I will ensure that he provides hon. Members with the kind of resource that they are asking for so that they can ensure that their local leadership is doing the right thing On the wider issue of staffing, the fact is that the nursing numbers in the service, which were found wanting at the time of the Mid Staffs scandal, could have been addressed only by significant changes in commissioning levels not two, three or four years ago but 10, 15 or 20 years ago. The service has failed under successive Administrations to predict the number of staff that it needs for the future. One of the more extraordinary functions that I possess is to have to sign off every year the commissioning of staff that will be required in 20 or 30 years’ time. My officials are a wise and brilliant group of people, but no one can behave like Nostradamus and expect to know what the service will require after that period of time That is why we have come to the conclusion that we need to increase significantly the number of places commissioned. Within the current spending envelope, however, it is simply not going to be possible to achieve the numbers that we wish to see. I think that Governments from both sides would have found that very difficult—in fact, impossible. That is why we came to the conclusion that we should release those places by transferring nurse graduates on to a loan system. I know that that is unpopular with Labour Members, but I hope that they will understand the rationale behind our doing so. It will allow us to add 10,000 additional places between now and the end of this Parliament. Those are 10,000 places that we will then be able to feed into additional nursing places, which will in time solve the underlying issues that parts of the country such as the hon. Lady’s have suffered for decades. One final aspect that I wish to bring to the hon. Lady’s attention, which I hope she will be pleased with, is that of the new role of nursing associate. It is supported by the Royal College of Nursing and to some extent by Unison, although it has reservations—a consultation is starting soon on this. It will provide a ladder of opportunity to healthcare assistants to move through an apprenticeship level up to the midway point of a nursing associate, and then on to being a full registered nurse. At present that is a course that healthcare assistants cannot take; it is not open to them I know that other parts of Yorkshire have no problem at all hiring healthcare assistants, but find it very difficult to hire registered nurses. That is a particular local difficulty. What I have proposed is a mechanism to give an opportunity to healthcare assistants to progress themselves, which they have many times missed out on because they did not have access to the decent formal education that we aim to provide now under the reformed education system. We are now offering, through an apprenticeship route that would not be open to them otherwise, a ladder of opportunity to a much wider group of people in the NHS, and at the same time helping to solve staffing issues where there are traditional, historical difficulties in hiring nurses I hope that with those general measures we will be able to do far more in the long term to solve the issue that the hon. Lady has identified. On the specific issues, I will ensure that she gets the reassurance she requires, not just on the reconfiguration, but on the leadership of her trust. I thank her and her colleague for bringing this important matter to the attention of the House Question put and agreed to.