Published: 21 May 2007
Government Promises funded by cuts elsewhere?
Plans to help unborn babies most at risk of social exclusion have been welcomed by health visitors – but not if the scheme turns out to be at the expense of helping families across the population.
The government proposals – announced last week - to give first-time, vulnerable mothers intensive support by health visitors and midwives for the first two years of the baby’s life have been welcomed by Unite/the Community Practitioners’ and Health Visitors’ Association (CPHVA).
But Unite/CPHVA is concerned that - at a time when more than one health visitor job a day is being lost, according to NHS workforce figures - the needs of families generally will not be met.
Unite/CPHVA has repeatedly made the point that problems of child development, postnatal depression, good parenting and child abuse also occur in wealthy suburbs and prosperous county towns.
Cheryll Adams, Lead Professional Officer, Unite Health Sector said:
“We do, in principle, support the government’s plans, but see it more in terms of supporting all vulnerable and other families with timely interventions to ensure that their baby has the best chance in life.
The new plans are feasible with sufficient resources and if it works, as research suggests it does, we should be doing it.
The problem is that these families constitute 2% of the population, and most other families will also have needs at some time and there will not be sufficient resources to meet these needs as they occur, for example, developmental checks missed and other vulnerable families not sufficiently supported.
There is other good research for positive health gains, for example, in relation to postnatal depression, as recommended by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which are not currently being implemented due to the cutbacks in the health visiting service and the 40% drop in training places in England this year”.
Dr Adams said she was concerned that there were apparently no new resources being made available for health visiting and she was also worried about the implications of the current Department of Health (DH) review of health visiting.
She continued:
“The danger is that the DH review will recommend a very limited targeted service to free up health visitors to work in this way.
It could herald the beginning of the loss of the universal non-stigmatising service”.
Unite/CPHVA recently calculated that with the cuts and recruitment freezes, there were 500,000 fewer visits to families by health visitors in the last year.
Further information
Unite/CPHVA website
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