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As of September 2024, there are 6,161 full time equivalent nursing associates employed across National Health Service trust and integrated care boards in England, and a further 1,167 in general practice organisations and primary care networks.

The following table shows the number of NHS trust and other core organisations, like integrated care boards and their predecessors, who had one or more nursing associates join the organisation over a 12-month period ending in September, each year from 2018 to 2024:

12 months ending	Count of organisations with nursing associate joiners
September 2019	140
September 2020	132
September 2021	179
September 2022	188
September 2023	195
September 2024	189

Source: NHS England’s NHS Hospital and Community Health Service Workforce Statistics.

Notes:

this data relates to the workforce directly employed in NHS trusts and other core organisations who are paid;
the data is based on a headcount and includes people returning to active service, like those returning from maternity leave or career break;
the data is calculated on an annual basis for each annual period in this analysis; and
the following two trusts are not in all time periods for turnover as they have not used the data source, the Electronic Staff Record (ESR), for all the years in this time series, and they are therefore included from the point at which a full year of data from ESR could be compared, as: Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (RP6) began using ESR in November 2018, and so is included in turnover data from the September 2019 to September 2020 period onwards; and the Chesterfield Royal Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (RFS) began using ESR in March 2021, and so is included in the turnover data from the September 2021 to September 2022 period onwards.

Nursing associates joining a body could be staff moving from another staff group or level of employment in the same organisation, likely moving from being a trainee nursing associate to being fully qualified, they could be newly employed within an organisation, having already undertaken nursing associate roles or training elsewhere, or they could be returning from unpaid breaks in service such as maternity leave or career breaks. The data is not available to assess nursing associate joiners in other NHS funded organisations, such as in general practices and primary care networks.

Lord Willis of Knaresborough

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