Published: 18 December 2006
School Nurses not Surgery is Key to Obesity Issue
Plans to tackle the obesity time bomb – advocated by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) – will be hampered by the lack of school nurses.
Amicus/The Community Practitioners’ and Health Visitors’ Association welcomed the majority of the NICE guidelines to tackle the prospect of more than 12 million adults and a million children becoming obese in the future.
But Amicus/CPHVA feels there would be no need for medication and surgery, if there were a comprehensive obesity prevention programme, backed up by adequate resources.
Amicus/CPHVA argues that school nurses play a vital role in the fight against obesity in children – but there are not enough them working in the UK’s 3,400 secondary schools.
Amicus/CPHVA’s Professional Officer for School Health and Public Health, Ros Godson said:
“Unfortunately, owing to recent financial pressures, there are far fewer school nurses and health visitors employed by primary care trusts, resulting in a loss of services to schools and nurseries.
These public health nurses are dealing with huge caseloads and are unable to deliver most of what is suggested because of lack of time and lack of commitment to the public health of children by senior NHS managers”.
It was recently revealed that one school nurse in Cornwall had a caseload of 9,000 children - a situation that even Health Secretary, Patricia Hewitt described as ‘horrific’.
Ros Godson continued:
“School nurses have the skills and are ideally placed to support the national effort to reduce the number of overweight and obese children, and could easily follow the NICE guidelines to deal with the vast majority of cases.
They could work with the whole school through the Healthy Schools Programme to prevent obesity, and offer intensive one-to-one intervention with overweight children and young people to support behavioural change and only, if necessary, refer them to their GP.
Children's centres and extended schools offer enormous opportunities to grasp this problem and offer the comprehensive and sustained health professional support advised by NICE.’
Government policy says there should be a full-time school nurse for every one of the UK’s 3,400 secondary schools and their cluster of primary schools, and Amicus/CPHVA has repeatedly called for the immediate recruitment of 500 extra school nurses.
However, then Health minister, Liam Byrne told the Commons in February, 2006 that there were only 2,409 nurses employed in schools at the end of September 2004, of which 856 (36%) were qualified school nurses.
Further information
NICE Obesity guidelines
Healthy Schools Programme
DH - Obesity
CPHVA website
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