Health Visitors and Nurses

Part of Oral Answers to Questions — Health – in the House of Commons at 11:30 am on 27 November 2012.

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Photo of Jeremy Hunt Jeremy Hunt The Secretary of State for Health 11:30, 27 November 2012

The reason why the CQC undertook its shocking investigation into the state of care in our country was that this Government introduced dignity and nutrition inspections, which never happened when the right hon. Gentleman was Secretary of State. He talked about numbers employed in the NHS, so let us look at them. Yes, there has been a 2% decline in the number of nurses, but there has been an increase in the nurse-to-bed ratio. There has been a 4% increase in the number of midwives, a 5% increase in the number of doctors and an increase of more than 50% in the number of health visitors—their number went down when he was in office. How much worse would those numbers have been if we had had the cut in NHS funding that he wanted?

Secretary of State

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