Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate he has made of the number of nurses employed in the NHS per head of population for each of the last ten years for which records are available.

The Department does not hold the information in the format requested.

However, the following table shows the number of nurses and health visitors in National Health Service trusts and clinical commissioning groups in England in the last 10 years as at September each year, full time equivalent:

Source: NHS Hospital and Community Health Service workforce statistics, NHS Digital