Nicholas Soames – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Nicholas Soames on 2015-10-12.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many district nurses are (a) in training and (b) in service; and how many district nurses were (i) in training and (ii) in service in each of the last five years.

Ben Gummer

Clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) are responsible for local decisions on services for patients, informed by a wide range of local clinicians. The shape of community nursing services is organised locally, following advice from clinicians. This commissioning process also takes into account the local authority’s views through the Joint Strategic Needs Assessment and the local Health and Wellbeing Strategy.

NHS England is working with local CCGs to ensure that services are based on the need of the local population, within the resources available and on evidenced-based best practice.

The latest available data from June 2015 shows that there are 5,033 district nurses in service. The following table contains the number of district nurses that were in service in each of the last five years.

Year	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014
District Nurses in service	7,813	7,132	6,611	5,877	5,590

Source: Health and Social Care Information Centre, Provisional NHS Hospital and Community Health Service (HCHS) monthly workforce statistics

The following table contains the number of district nurses in training in each of the last five completed financial years, with the exception of the 2013/14 data which was not collected centrally by Health Education England. Data is not yet available for the 2015/16 financial year.

Year	2010/11	2011/12	2012/13	2013/14	2014/15
District Nurses in training	236	177	186	n/a	381

Source: multi professional education and training budget monitoring returns