FTE health visitors - Find a freedom of information request

As you may recall, Dr. Gabriella Conti, Professor at the Department of Economics, University College London, and our team are working to evaluate the impact of health visiting on health outcomes in England.

You have already provided us with highly valuable information on your health visiting teams, and we are very grateful for your cooperation and service.

We have released some of our findings in a briefing note (https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10132710/), and we would like to note that Professor Conti's research has sparked much interest from policy makers and chief nurses, having been cited in the Westminster Hall Debate on maternal mental health led by Sarah Olney MP, having recently presented at the APPG from Conception to Age 2 meeting on 'Health Visitors, Midwives and Family Hubs' chaired by Tim Loughton MP, as well as having been well received by Andrea Leadsom's Early years healthy development review team, all amongst also being featured across several media outlets like a BBC radio programme and news outlets such as the Guardian.

Given the keen policy relevant interest and important nature of our work, we find it imperative to ensure that our data collection process is as robust and complete as is practically possible.

Consequently, we have learned throughout our FOI requests that we have missed out certain pay-bands in previous FOI requests, the exclusion of which would skew our statistical and econometric analyses.

Thus, we are currently asking if you could kindly 'fill in the gaps'. We have attached a pre-filled template with information previously received (as highlighted in green) from Lincolnshire, along with missing information indicated by the blanks as well as highlighted in yellow. We are writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request if you could provide information for the missing cells in the attached template regarding your health visiting teams for Lincolnshire, on the 1st of February 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021, based on the following questions:

1. How many FTE health visitors were employed in your health visiting teams? (Both with and without caseload). Please provide this information for the missing pay-bands left in the template as blank and highlighted in yellow.

2. How many FTE clinical staff (who are NOT coded as health visitors) were employed in your health visiting teams? (Both with and without caseload). Please provide this information for the missing pay-bands left in the template as blank and highlighted in yellow.

3. How many FTE health visitors only with caseload were employed in your health visiting teams? Please provide this information for the missing pay-bands left in the template as blank and highlighted in yellow.

4. How many FTE clinical staff (who are NOT coded as health visitors) only with caseload were employed in your health visiting teams? Please provide this information for the missing pay-bands left in the template as blank and highlighted in yellow.

5. What was the total number of children under 5 years of age that your health visiting teams were responsible for?

In case a certain pay-band has zero FTE (i.e., no staff under that pay-band), we ask if you could please input zero ('0') in the template. _____________________________________________________________________ ____________ Regarding the questions above: - For your answers, please either use the NHS Digital definition of health visitor below or alternatively provide the definition that you are using in your answer. _____________________________________________________________________ ____________ Definitions: Definition used by NHS Digital re. Health visitors (notes 28 and 29 from the nursing, midwifery and health visiting staff matrix of Occupation Code Manual): 28. Please ensure to code the following as Health Visitors: * qualified nurses/midwives who also hold a qualification as a Registered Health Visitor under the Specialist Community Public Health Nursing part of the NMC Register working directly with children and families; * qualified and registered Health Visitors who perform specific activities such as providing breastfeeding advice to parents; * family nurses working within the Family Nurse Partnership Programme who are qualified and registered as Health Visitors; * Sure Start Children's Centre qualified and registered named Health Visitors; * managers within a Health visiting team who hold a health visiting qualification and registration and are involved in clinical work or safeguarding. 29. Please ensure that the following employees are not coded as Health Visitors: * any person working in a health visiting team who does not hold a qualification and registration as a Health Visitor; * any person who holds a qualification and registration as a Health Visitor but is not employed in a role where this is a requirement; * managers within a health visiting team who hold health visiting qualification and registration but are not involved in clinical work or safeguarding.

Please see below the general definition for 'health visitor' from the Occupation Code Manual: Health Visitor: an employee who holds a qualification as a Registered Health Visitor under the Specialist Community Public Health Nursing part of the NMC Register and who occupies a post where such a qualification is a requirement. Not below Agenda for change band 6.

I can confirm that the information requested is held by Lincolnshire County Council. I have detailed below the information that is being released to you.

Please see attached. 

Should you require the attachment mentioned above please contact customerinformationservice@lincolnshire.gov.uk with the below reference number and this can be provided.