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NHS Staffing

My hon. Friend touches on an important issue. All too often, the Government talk about head-count numbers but not full-time equivalents. In response to a point raised earlier by my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (Sir Nicholas Winterton) about midwives, the Government have suggested that there has been a massive increase in the head-count numbers, but if one looks at the number of full-time equivalent midwives, one finds that the situation has hardly changed at all. That would account for a lot of the shortages.