I welcome NHS Digital's effort in cleaning up the data used to produce the statistics, however, there is still more work to be done.
As I've said in previous blogs, when analysing statistics its not just a case of looking at spreadsheets and adding/subtracting numbers, one must take into account methodology and data procurement to also understand the meaning behind the numbers.
So back to the NHS workforce statistics, is Jeremy Hunt and Theresa May right when they claim an extra 15,000 nurses in the NHS since 2010. The honest answer is NO but to give a definitive figure is not possible due to data problems at source.
If I analyse the current statistics March 2017 and compare them with March 2010 (take note BBC factcheck, if comparing like for like then you should use 12 months stats not 14 months)
and do a simple subtraction then the number of hours nurses are working are up by 3911 FTEs.
However, its important that we do not look at these figures and think these figures represent actual number of staff working in the NHS, rather we have to remember that these figures are worked out in terms of hours worked by individuals not individuals themselves. So the total number of nurses working hours could be up by 3911 FTEs but it does not mean there are 3911 new/extra nurses.
The workforce figures are categorised into two sets: Whole Time Equivalent (WTE) and Full Time Equivalent (FTE). Thus, e.g. if I employed two members of staff working 60 hrs per week instead of the contracted 37.5 hrs then for FTE purposes I would have 3.2 people in my workforce,whereas I really have only two! so you can see how this could inflate the actual workforce numbers and why there is so much confusion surrounding them.
Talking about inflating workforce numbers - I am not convinced NHS Digital have removed all private nurses from their stats. I do not see 30,000 drop in their nursing stats since it was discovered they were included in 2015. Nor are the bank nurses fully dropped from the data either.
The best indication of NHS workforce is looking at the datasets individual Trusts publish under their 'safestaffing' sections.
