Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many full time equivalent health visitors there have been in each of the last 10 years.

Responsibility for commissioning of health visiting services transferred to local authorities in October 2015. Local authorities are best placed to respond to the needs of their local population through commissioning National Health Service trusts and private sector organisations to provide health visiting services.

There is no single source that counts health visitors across the whole public sector.

NHS Digital publishes Hospital and Community Health Services (HCHS) workforce statistics. These include staff working in hospital trusts and clinical commissioning groups, but not staff working in primary care, general practitioner surgeries, local authorities or other providers.

The following table shows the number of HCHS health visitors as at September each year since 2010 and July 2020, the latest available data, full time equivalent (FTE).

Source: NHS Workforce Statistics

NHS Digital also collects and publishes data on staff, including health visitors, in some English independent sector healthcare organisations. These statistics do not represent the entire independent sector workforce as only 59 organisations provided data for September 2019.

The following table shows the number of FTE independent sector health visitors as at September each year since 2015 to 2019, this is the latest available data.

Source: NHS Digital. Independent Healthcare Provider Workforce Statistics