Parkinson’s Disease: Nurses

(asked on 23rd January 2026) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many specialist Parkinson’s nurses are currently employed within the NHS in (a) England and (b) Coventry and Warwickshire.


Answered by
Karin Smyth Portrait
Karin Smyth
Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
This question was answered on 28th January 2026

The Department does not hold a central count of the number of specialist Parkinson’s nurses employed across the National Health Service, either in England as a whole or in Coventry and Warwickshire specifically.

Specialist Parkinson’s nurses play a vital role in supporting people with Parkinson’s disease through personalised care, medicines management, and advice on self‑management. However, these posts are not recorded as a discrete workforce category in national workforce datasets. Workforce planning, including decisions about the number and type of specialist nurses needed locally, is the responsibility of individual employers and their integrated care boards (ICBs), which are best placed to assess the needs of their populations.

The Department does not hold data on the number of neurologists with specialist training in Parkinson’s disease, either nationally in England or within Coventry and Warwickshire. National workforce datasets do not record condition‑specific sub‑specialisms within neurology, and responsibility for determining local specialist workforce configurations rests with individual employers and ICBs.

As of October 2025, there are 51 full-time equivalent (FTE) doctors working in the specialty of neurology within the Coventry and Warwickshire ICB area. This is a decrease of one, or 2.2%, compared to last year and an increase of 23, or 79.3%, compared to five years ago. This includes 21 FTE consultants. This is an increase of two, or 9.9%, compared to last year and six, or 41.5%, compared to five years ago.

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