Children's Nurse at Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust

The job at Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust

Children's nurses care for patients from newborns through to adolescents, interpreting behaviour and non-verbal cues to spot rapid deterioration in children who cannot always describe their symptoms clearly. They work closely with parents and guardians alongside the child, and as part of multidisciplinary teams including doctors, play specialists, psychologists and social workers. Children's nurses practise across hospital wards, day-care centres, outpatient clinics and community or home settings. Babies, children and young people from birth to adolescence, and their parents or guardians.

At an acute trust such as Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust, that work means an acute hospital caseload — inpatients on the wards, emergency and critical care, theatres and diagnostics, and hospital outpatient clinics, with the working day shaped by admissions, ward rounds and discharge planning. Newly qualified posts here are usually rotational: four to six months at a time in a different clinical area, which is how you find out what you want to specialise in before you commit. Across the profession as a whole, children's nurses work in settings including hospital wards, day-care centres, outpatient clinics and community and home settings — an organisation of this type will run some of those services and not others, which is why two posts with the same job title in the same city can be very different jobs.

Pay is not an employer decision. Agenda for Change is negotiated nationally and set separately in each of the four nations, so Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust pays band 5 exactly what every other NHS employer in England pays it: £32,073 at the bottom of the band on the 2026/27 scale. What genuinely differs between two employers is the caseload, how rotations are structured, how much protected time you get for supervision and continuing professional development, how much band 6 progression is built into the establishment, and how far you travel between sites. Those are the questions worth asking at interview.

This page states no figure specific to Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust because none is published in the open data. When the workforce and staff survey feeds include this organisation, the establishment size, the response rate and the theme scores will appear above.