NHS Trust Classification Dataset (England, 2023/24)

A reference classification of all 205 NHS provider trusts in England, giving each trust's ODS code, organisational type, NHS England sub-classification and foundation status. It exists to solve a linkage problem: NHS organisational data is published across the Data Security and Protection Toolkit, Trust Accounts Consolidation returns, the Estates Returns Information Collection and workforce statistics, each with its own naming conventions and not always carrying ODS codes. Version 1.1 changes the classification basis. Earlier versions classified each trust by manually reading its primary service function. That basis has been retired. category and nhse_subtype are now taken directly from NHS England's own published provider classification, in the NHS Oversight Framework provider data files, joined on ODS code. The 205 trust codes in those files match this dataset's frame exactly, with no trust in one absent from the other. No trust here is classified by reading its website, its name or its CQC registration. No statutory register of trust types exists. "Acute trust", "mental health trust" and "community trust" are administrative descriptions, not protected provider statuses, and no national source assigns one to a trust as a matter of law. The Oversight Framework classification is the best published per-provider alternative: it is the classification used by the body that oversees the system, it is addressable by ODS code, and it is reproducible by anyone who downloads the same three files. It is a classification and not a statutory fact, and this dataset says so rather than implying otherwise. Category totals: acute 134, mental health 44, community 14, care trust 3, ambulance 10. Total 205. Two changes of shape specialist is no longer a category. NHS England classifies single-specialty providers as Acute - Specialist, a subtype of acute rather than a peer of it. Sixteen trusts move from specialist to acute , and each keeps Acute - Specialist in the new nhse_subtype column, so the earlier stratum is recoverable exactly. Treating specialist as a category asserted a distinction NHS England does not make. care_trust is added. A Care Trust is an integrated health and social care body and a distinct organisational form. Three trusts hold it: Bradford District Care, North London, and Sheffield Health and Social Care. Reclassifications Twenty-two rows change. Sixteen are the specialist re-shaping above. Six are substantive: RV9 Humber Teaching NHS Foundation Trust, acute to mental health RXE Rotherham Doncaster and South Humber NHS Foundation Trust, acute to mental health R1A Herefordshire and Worcestershire Health and Care NHS Trust, mental health to community TAD Bradford District Care NHS Foundation Trust, mental health to care trust G6V2S North London NHS Foundation Trust, mental health to care trust TAH Sheffield Health and Social Care NHS Foundation Trust, mental health to care trust RV9 and RXE were found independently, before NHS England's classification was consulted. Both had sat in acute since the first release, and both were caught by a verification pass over the whole acute category, which required a quotation and a source URL for every finding. Humber Teaching describes its own services as “community and therapy services, primary care, community and inpatient mental health services, learning disability services, healthy lifestyle support and addictions services”, a list with no acute hospital service in it. NHS.uk files Rotherham Doncaster and South Humber under its mental health trust path. The CQC care directory then agreed: 10 of Humber's 15 registered locations, and 6 of Rotherham Doncaster and South Humber's 8, are registered as mental health hospitals. NHS England's classification is the third independent source to reach the same answer. Temporal scope, corrected The frame is a snapshot of NHS provider trusts in England as at 10 January 2026. Names and foundation status come from the 2023/24 financial returns, which is where the title's year comes from, but the membership is not a 2023/24 population, and earlier versions described it as one in error. The as-at date was corrected on 23 August 2026, and README.md was replaced within Zenodo's file-modification window to match. The version number, the DOI and nhs_trust_classification.csv are unchanged, and no classification, column or row changed. This record first gave the date as early November 2025, derived from an FOI contact list described as "fixed on 8 November 2025". That list's own sent_date column records 204 requests sent on 8 November 2025 and one sent on 10 January 2026 — RWK East London NHS Foundation Trust — so the frame reached 205 members on the later date. One row forces the correction. North London NHS Foundation Trust was formed on 1 November 2024 by merging Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust with Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust. It is in this frame; neither predecessor is. A reference frame is a snapshot as at a date, and a financial year cannot be a snapshot, because mergers happen inside years. The membership is not wrong, and it is the correct population for the studies that use it, but its stated basis was wrong, and this version corrects it. Why name-based inference fails A regular expression on the trust's legal name is the common shortcut, and it does not work. Measured against this dataset: 4 of the 44 mental health trusts carry the word "Mental" in their legal name, a recall of 9 per cent with no false positives. The other 40 are named Partnership, Healthcare, Health and Care, or nothing distinguishing at all. Any analysis that derives trust type from a name substring will place most mental health providers in whichever group is its residual. Source files The exact published files this classification is built from and checked against are deposited with the dataset, with their retrieval URLs, sizes and MD5 checksums. They are held rather than linked because the Care Quality Commission keeps only its current directory edition on its own site, and the October 2025 edition now exists in one public place, a single Internet Archive capture. A reproducibility claim that depends on a third party keeping one capture alive is not a reproducibility claim. NHS England, NHS Oversight Framework provider data, September 2025 edition: acute, non-acute hospital and ambulance trust files. Open Government Licence v3.0. Care Quality Commission, CQC care directory, edition of 29 October 2025, used to corroborate the mental health and community classifications. Open Government Licence v3.0.