Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what proportion of NHS trust (a) Chairs and (b) Chief Executives are women.
NHS Digital publishes workforce statistics and the following table shows the proportion of Chairs and Chief Executives of National Health Service trusts and clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) in England that are women.
NHS Hospital and Community Health Services (HCHS): Staff with a Job Role 'Chair' and 'Chief Executive' in NHS trusts and CCGs in England by gender as at 30 November 2017, headcount
| All staff | Male | Female |
Staff with a Job Role 'Chair' (Headcount) | 30 | 18 | 12 |
Staff with a Job Role 'Chief Executive' (Headcount) | 272 | 149 | 123 |
Source: NHS Digital provisional NHS HCHS monthly workforce statistics
The majority of NHS Digital statistics are based upon Occupation Code. As Occupation Code doesn’t allow the distinction of roles ‘Chair’ and ‘Chief Executive’, Job Role has been used for this analysis, as distinct values for ‘Chair’ and ‘Chief Executive’ exist. Job Role at individual trusts is subject to data quality and completeness issues, hence the apparently low numbers of staff.
The Job Role reproduced here is that submitted by individual NHS organisations and not subject to the types of validation procedures undertaken by NHS Digital for other data items used in official publications. As such, these figures should be treated with a degree of caution.