Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many school nurses there are in (a) Burnley constituency, (b) Lancashire and (c) the North West.

The school nurse workforce is relatively small and no formal assessment has been made of recent changes to school nursing numbers by the Department or Public Health England (PHE), who only hold national figures. School nurses can be employed by a range of organisations including health trusts and, more recently, local authorities. Current local data collections do not cover the complete range of these organisations. As a result, it is not possible to provide accurate data on the total size of the school nurse workforce.

Data is available for National Health Service trust and clinical commissioning group (CCG) area based school nurses for the North West Health Education England (HEE) Region and for Lancashire and is presented in the table below. Parliamentary constituencies do not correspond directly to recognised health geographies, so no data is provided for Burnley constituency.

NHS Hospital and Community Health Services: school nursing staff in NHS trusts and CCGs in Lancashire and North West Health Education England region, as at 30 November 2016

Source: NHS Digital

Lancashire includes data for all organisations which fall within the area of the NHS England Region (Local Office) of NHS England North (Lancashire).