Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 2:43 pm on 25 September 2019.
The Member may have picked up and forgotten, when reading out her supplementary question, that we talked about the NHS workforce strategy in response to two questions earlier on today. I recognise that, last year, the last year for which we have figures, there were 65 more leavers than joiners in terms of the nursing workforce; that is in contrast to a steady trend of increases in nursing numbers. Between 2009-18, nursing numbers have gone up by 3.8 per cent in total. The Member reflects figures of people who have left the service, but, of course, we are recruiting each year as well. The Member will also know that we have regularly rehearsed within this Chamber the work that we are doing on looking to recruit further nurses. The ‘Train. Work. Live.’ campaign has been successful. In fact, the Royal College of Nursing themselves have been complimentary about that particular campaign. It's also a matter of fact that, in the last five years, we've increased nurse training places by 68 per cent in Wales. So, we are doing all that we can and should do to increase the number of nurses coming into the profession, as with, indeed, the work that we are doing—the Member referred to some of it—on making sure we have more flexible patterns that reflect the reality of someone's work to try to make sure that we retain the nurses that we currently have as well. The big factor, of course, that will affect some of our ability to recruit nurses in the future is our continuing relationship with Europe, where we still recruit and have a number of European Union and wider economic area nurses within the NHS family.