NHS trusts and health boards that employ nurses and nursing associates

How to read this list

Every organisation here is an NHS body that employs nurses or nursing associates. In England they are trusts and foundation trusts, each responsible for a defined set of services. In Scotland and Wales a health board is responsible for all NHS care for a population, and in Northern Ireland the equivalent is a health and social care trust, which runs social care alongside health. That structural difference matters more than it sounds: with one employer covering the whole pathway, a rotation can take you from an acute ward to a community team without you changing jobs, whereas in England the same move is usually a job application to a different organisation. The 242 organisations below sit across 12 regions and nations. London has the largest cluster in England, with 31 organisations.

The organisation type in the table is the single most useful field on this page, because it tells you what the work is actually like. An acute trust gives you wards, theatres, outpatient clinics and emergency care, and it is where the largest number of newly qualified adult nursing and children’s nursing posts sit — often inside a structured preceptorship programme that moves you across more than one ward before you settle into a specialty. A community trust gives you a geographical caseload delivered in people’s homes, health centres and GP practices, with far more autonomy, usually with a car and a diary you manage yourself. A mental health trust is where mental health nursing is the dominant workforce, across inpatient wards, specialist units and community mental health teams. A specialist trust — including the dedicated children’s hospitals — concentrates one kind of work, so you go deep quickly but you see less breadth. An ambulance service is built around the paramedic workforce and is not a primary nursing employer on this site, though ambulance trusts do employ a small number of nurses in urgent and same-day-care roles.

What you are paid is not an employer decision. Agenda for Change is negotiated nationally and set separately in each of the four nations, so two trusts in the same city pay the same band 5 the same salary. In England that is £32,073 at the bottom of band 5 on the 2026/27 scale. The exception is the high cost area supplement paid in and around London: 20% of basic pay in the inner zone, worth between £5,794 and £8,746 a year on the 2026/27 scale. Which zone applies depends on the site the post is based at, and that is not published in the open data, so check the advert. Choose between employers on caseload, rotation, supervision and travel, not on salary — and remember that the trust you are placed with as a student is very often the trust that interviews you first.