At First Minister's Questions on the 9th June, Nicola Sturgeon reiterated that the SNP have increased nursing staff by 6% since coming to power; this would gives nursing statistics an increase of over 2000 nursing staff. One would be forgiven if they interpreted this as our NHS having 2000 qualified nurses working in our wards and our community, as stated by Health secretary Shona Robison. Unfortunately it does not. I decided to have a closer look at the nursing statistics and raised some questions with ISD, Scotland's equivalent to HSCIC, both organisations responsible for collating, analysing and publishing the statistics relating to the NHS.
I first asked ISD if they could confirm that Nicola Sturgeon was correct in her statement to parliament that there was an increase of 6% - the response was that it was correct
So it looks from this Sturgeon was correct and everything in hunky-dory
however...something's not right; this does not marry up with news headlines
and this
I wanted to look closer at the 43,418 figure. Forget the 29 interns - they are not qualified, so now we are down to 43,388 "qualified nurses".
ISD sent me the sub tables for nurse/midwifes workforce to examine
The sub tables have drop down menus that allow one to search by categories
- Hospital
- Community
- Hospital/Community Combined
- Prison (Clinical staff came over to NHS control in 2013)
- Other/Non applicable
Hospital
In this section I found there was an increase in qualified nurses/midwifes; and increase of 255 since 2011 (sub tables only went back to 2011)
Community
In this section I found an increase of 401
This section showed a decrease of 945
Prison
This showed 196 nursing staff moved over to NHS
Other/Non applicable
This is a strange category and one I had to seek clarity from ISD as to its meaning
It was indeed very helpful! So office staff are included in the nursing figures as their pay in under Agenda for Change Pay Rates
This category shows the biggest increase over the years from 935 in 2011 to 2374 in 2016 - an increase of 1439
Oh dear and I thought the Tories were bad at using dodgy stats!
If we add up all the figures it shows 'real' qualified nurses/midwifes working in our NHS Scotland is 41,013 - lower than 2006 figures!
I shall be sending my findings to the Scottish Parliament - watch this space.
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