Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what information his Department holds on the number of health visitors in (a) England, (b) London and (c) the London Borough of Lewisham in each of the last 10 years.

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

The following table shows the full time equivalent (FTE) figures of health visitors in England, London and the London Borough of Lewisham as at 30 September in the specified years and the latest available data.

Source: NHS HCHS monthly workforce statistics, NHS Digital

Due to changes in the data collection and processing methodology, figures for 2007 and 2008 are not directly comparable to figures from September 2009 onwards.

Since September 2015 NHS Digital has been collecting Independent Healthcare Provider Workforce statistics. These statistics are collected biannually and published as experimental statistics. The following table shows the FTE figures of health visitors employed by Independent Healthcare Providers in England, as at 30 September each year since 2015 and the latest data available:

Source: Independent Healthcare Provider Workforce Statistics, England, March 2018, NHS Digital

Information is not held centrally on the number of health visitors in London and the London Borough of Lewisham from independent healthcare providers.

As health visitors are employed by a range of organisations, including National Health Service trusts, CCGs, local authorities and private providers, current data collections do not cover the complete range of these organisations. Consequently, it is not possible to provide accurate data on the total size of the health visitor workforce.