Hunt vs Burnham: nurse numbers do fall every summer
The Sunday People this weekend reported that NHS England lost 1,800 nurses this summer. That's right, and if you count midwives, health visitors, and school nurses the fall is closer to 2,100.
In the same article Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham commented: "Nurse losses on this scale risk threatening standards of patient care." We've been contacted by his office to tell us that he was referring to a longer term drop in senior nurses here, as a drop in their numbers was mentioned elsewhere in the article.
Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt seems to have interpreted the comments to mean that the headline 1,800 figure shows a threat to patient safety, saying in a letter to Mr Burnham: "As you will know as a former Secretary of State for Health, nursing numbers are subject to seasonal variation, which means there is always a temporary dip in the Summer months."
He's right to say there's a seasonal drop. As we've written before this happens every year; that means it's only meaningful to compare NHS staff numbers to the same point in previous years. There's always a jump in numbers as new staff qualify in Autumn, and then a tailing off as nurses retire or otherwise change their working patterns over the course of the year.
At the same point last year (June to August), nursing numbers went down by 1,200 using the Sunday People's headline measure.
We've included midwives and health visitors in our graph, but either way the trend is the same.
From August 2013 to August 2014, nursing staff numbers went up 5,600 by the measure we've used in our graph and 4,100 if midwives, health visitors and school nurses are excluded.
In a previous version of this article we said that Andy Burnham's quote on the impact of nurse losses referred to the 1,800 drop in nurses from June to August 2014. We've been told by his office that isn't the case, and have corrected accordingly.