Children's Nurse jobs in Northern Ireland

What a first post here looks like

Newly qualified children's nurses in Northern Ireland are appointed at band 5, and that band means the same thing in every organisation in the region: £31,049 at the bottom, £37,796 at the top, under the Northern Ireland pay circular for 2025/26. No employer here can outbid another for you on basic pay, which changes what you are really choosing between. Northern Ireland publishes its own circular, so the same band is worth £31,049 here against £32,073 in England.

The post itself is usually rotational: you are appointed to the department rather than to one clinical area, and you move through a sequence of placements — commonly general paediatric medicine, surgical and specialist children’s wards, within a children’s hospital or a general trust’s children’s unit — before settling on a specialty. This is where the choice between employers in Northern Ireland actually bites. A large acute organisation holds more of those rotations in-house; a specialist or community organisation may hold only some, and you would need to change employer to get the rest. Read the rotation list in the advert, not the job title, and ask which rotations are guaranteed rather than aspirational.

Northern Ireland has both sides of the market: 5 NHS organisations that plausibly employ children's nurses, and 1 approved course producing graduates into it. That matters when you are judging how hard a first post will be to get. Where local course provision is heavy relative to the number of employers, expect more applicants per advert and more weight on where you did your placements — students who placed with a trust are known quantities when a band 5 post opens there. One further NHS organisation in the region is of a type that rarely holds posts in this profession, so it is left out of the list below.