Published: 04 September 2006
Vision or Just More Spin?
Tony Blair has been challenged to spell out where the extra health visitors are coming from to implement his new social vision to prevent babies and young children being ‘at risk’.
Amicus/The Community Practitioners’ and Health Visitors’ Association is asking for the Prime Minister to flesh out last week’s announcement which called for possible problems, beginning as early as pre-birth, to be identified and acted on.
Obi Amadi, Lead Professional Officer, Amicus Health Sector said:
“While we welcome Tony Blair’s belated interest in this area of policy, we want to know where the extra health visitors – who are at their lowest number for 12 years – are coming from to provide the interventions that the PM is now calling for.
Our members are either losing their jobs or having their caseloads increased dramatically, because of recruitment freezes caused by the deficits in debt-laden primary care trusts.
The greatest service that the Prime Minister could do for the next generation of yet-unborn children is to ask his Health Secretary to order primary care trusts (PCTs) and other health sector employers to reverse their cuts to health visitors and the services they provide.
Unimaginative NHS managers are targeting health visitors and community nurses as ‘a soft option’ to balance their books.
To have a vision is good; to have ‘joined up’ government is better”.
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.
Amicus/CPHVA has just launched its Who Cares? campaign aimed at halting the decline in community nursing services.
Further information
CPHVA website
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WHO CARES? - Campaign to Save Community Nursing Services
‘Ad Hoc’ approach will leave NHS Community Health ICT ‘In Hock’
Amicus CPHVA welcomes critical ISTC report
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