Published: 29 August 2006
WHO CARES? - Campaign to Save Community Nursing Services
The biggest crisis that the health visiting and community nurse professions have ever faced in their long histories is the spur behind the launch of the Amicus Health Who Cares? campaign.
Amicus is urging its NHS members to lobby their MPs, the media and the general public this autumn to reverse the decimation by debt-ridden primary care trusts of frontline staff and the services they provide to the community.
Amicus said that its members are threatened by a combination of factors that have all coalesced in 2006 to create this crisis,
Karen Reay, the Lead Professional Officer for Professional Policy and Practice, Amicus Health said:
“This situation could have easily been avoided if the promises that the new Labour government made in 1997 had been translated into a concrete reality during the past nine years”.
The key threats to health visiting can be headlined as:
· Unimaginative NHS managers are targeting community nursing as ‘the soft option’ when it comes to making cuts to services – the excuse being large deficits in a small number of primary care trusts. Noticeably, these top executives aren’t putting their own jobs on the line.
· Training places for health visitors for 2006/7 have fallen significantly with some training institutions under threat of not being able to run courses this year.
· The number of health visitors fell to 9,809 whole time equivalents (WTE) for England in 2005 – a 12-year low.
· The onward march of the market, in the form of Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs), Independent Sector Treatment Centres (ISTCs), and other market-orientated initiatives, employing a plethora of management consultants, has drained billions from the NHS budget that could have been better spent on frontline services.
· An inability at the highest level of government (i.e. Health Secretary, Patricia Hewitt) to recognise the seriousness of the situation and her refusal to issue an immediate directive to strategic health authorities (SHAs) and primary care trusts (PCTs) to reverse the decline in community nursing.
· Nearly 20% of health visitors are due to retire in the next few years with the loss of high levels of expertise.
· Health visitors are in the frontline when it comes to detecting:
Postnatal depression - one in six women are affected by mental distress during pregnancy and after the birth of their child.
Child protection - 16% of children experience serious maltreatment by parents or carers, according to a 2002 NSPCC survey.
Domestic violence - one in four women experience domestic violence at some stage in their lifetime.
School nurses are the key professionals when it comes to tackling teenage pregnancy, obesity, mental health problems, and drug and alcohol dependency in the school age population.
Karen Reay continued:
“We believe that community nurses play an extremely important role in the public health of the nation – but their numbers are under severe attack with the potential adverse knock-on effects for the future.
We are urging our members to make their voice heard and case known before it is too late – and are seeking the public’s support in doing this”.
Further information
The Who Cares? campaign pack
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Amicus CPHVA welcomes critical ISTC report
‘Halt job cuts’, MPs Told
Health Visiting Faces ‘Meltdown’
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