Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many paediatric mental health nurses were employed by the NHS in each month since May 2010.

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 attached table shows the number of paediatric mental health nurses who work in National Health Service trusts and CCGs in England as at the last day of each specified month from May 2010 to July 2018 (latest available), full time equivalent.

Paediatric mental health nurses include qualified nurses & health visitors within the care settings 'Community Mental Health' and 'Other Mental Health', with Tertiary Areas of Work 'Child and Adolescent Psychiatry' and 'Child Psychotherapy'.

The Area of Work reproduced here is that submitted by individual NHS organisations and has not been subject to the types of validation procedures undertaken by NHS Digital in relation to many other data items used in official publications. As such, these figures should be treated with a degree of caution.