{"id":11792,"date":"2017-03-14T15:38:29","date_gmt":"2017-03-14T15:38:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/unitelive.org\/?p=11792"},"modified":"2017-03-14T15:38:29","modified_gmt":"2017-03-14T15:38:29","slug":"health-visitor-vanishes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/unitelive.test.igniteamt.com\/?p=11792","title":{"rendered":"The health visitor vanishes?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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After the government launched a concerted drive to recruit more health visitors \u00e2\u20ac\u201c whose numbers had over the years become dangerously low \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a disaster was averted, as targets set in 2011 to train more than 4,000 health visitors by 2015 were successfully hit.<\/p>\n

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But now all that hard work is under threat after responsibility for health visitors and school nurses was transferred from the NHS to local authorities in the same year.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The latest figures show that the numbers of health visitors in the NHS are steadily falling \u00e2\u20ac\u201c there were 9,410 whole time equivalent health visitors in 2016, compared with 10,309 the year before. A similar pattern emerged among school nurses \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 2,561 whole time equivalent school nurses worked in the NHS in 2016, compared with 2,725 the year previous.<\/p>\n

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But Unite believes the scale of the problem of declining community nurse numbers will remain hidden because there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no overall accounting of the number of these nurses now working for local councils.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u015bThe lack of an overall \u00e2\u20ac\u0098controlling mind\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 about the number of health visitors and school nurses working for local government will hamper workforce planning and lead to a fragmentation of services for families with babies and young children,\u00e2\u20ac\u0165 explained Unite lead professional officer Obi Amadi.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u015bNHS health visitor numbers have been dropping almost consistently from month to month since October 2015, when the workforce was at its largest size recorded in more than a decade,\u00e2\u20ac\u0165 she added.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u015bFamilies with young children and babies are facing a ticking health time bomb because of the sorry and sad decline in health visitor and school nurse numbers \u00e2\u20ac\u201c this can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be right for a strong preventative public health policy.\u00e2\u20ac\u0165<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The \u00e2\u20ac\u0098ticking health time bomb\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Unite member and health visitor Veronica Steele, who has worked in the NHS for more than three decades, can attest personally to this \u00e2\u20ac\u0098ticking health time bomb\u00e2\u20ac\u2122.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u015bWe\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re always very short-staffed, and we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re always being asked to do more than we can do,\u00e2\u20ac\u0165 she explained. \u00e2\u20ac\u015bNow that local councils are commissioning our services, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re requiring us to do a lot of social care \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s very hard for us to do the nursing care all while addressing the social needs of our clients.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u015bI\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got to the point where I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m thinking \u00e2\u20ac\u201c how am I going to serve my clients, how am I going to give them my best if I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m pressed for time because we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re so understaffed and under-resourced? I love the job and I think it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s valuable but we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re asked to do more with less resources. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s becoming impossible \u00e2\u20ac\u201c we have to have a rethink.\u00e2\u20ac\u0165<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not only community nursing that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s under threat \u00e2\u20ac\u201c other public health services are also feeling the pressure.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A new King\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Fund report<\/a> published today (March 14) found that despite NHS acute and specialist services grabbing all the headlines in the national conversation about health funding cuts, these services have been for the most part protected \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it is public health that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s suffering most.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Even though the public health grant increased once services were transferred from the NHS to local authorities, this did not last long. In 2015-16 public health budgets were cut by nearly \u00c2\u0141200m, with councils now being asked to make hundreds millions more in savings by 2020-21.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u015bThe government needs to secure the future of community nursing by increasing and ringfencing money for these professions and the vital work with families that they carry out on a daily basis,\u00e2\u20ac\u0165 Amadi argued.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u015bThe \u00e2\u20ac\u0098public health\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 purse strings are now held by local councils, struggling with unrelenting cuts from Whitehall. While, in theory, public health budgets are ringfenced, in practice, council bosses can interpret what constitutes \u00e2\u20ac\u0098public health\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 in flexible ways.\u00e2\u20ac\u0165<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Indeed, today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s King\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Fund report found that the public health budget is \u00e2\u20ac\u0098quite leaky\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the think tank heard from people they interviewed that some councils were defining spending on services such as parks as falling within the purview of public health.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The King\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Fund investigation said that the direction of travel, in which public health services are being left behind, \u00e2\u20ac\u015bsuggests the NHS is moving further away from its goal of strengthening community-based services and focusing on prevention, rather than making progress towards it.\u00e2\u20ac\u0165<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Vigilance <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Amadi reiterated the call for vigilance over community nursing workforce numbers.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u015bWhat we fear is that overall workforce planning for health visiting and school nursing will fall between the NHS and local authorities \u00e2\u20ac\u201c such a split can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be the best way forward and would be another example of further NHS fragmentation,\u00e2\u20ac\u0165 she said.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

She pointed too to the 44 new Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs), which she called \u00e2\u20ac\u015bthe latest Trojan Horse aimed at privatising NHS services for corporate profit.\u00e2\u20ac\u0165<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

These STPs divide England into 44 regional areas and are essentially plans to introduce NHS reforms by making massive savings \u00e2\u20ac\u201c they were recently given a significant \u00c2\u0141325m funding boost by the chancellor Phillip Hammond in the budget.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Unite researcher James Lazou said that STPs would have serious implications for public health because they represent another top-down reorganisation that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s historically proved to be so detrimental for services such as health visiting.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u015bSTPs\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 entire raison d’\u0102\u015etre is to deliver a huge amounts of cuts,\u00e2\u20ac\u0165 he said.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Unite head of health Sarah Carpenter warned that STPs would usher in yet another wave of NHS privatisation \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the way they create separate health economies would prove \u00e2\u20ac\u015bvery\u00c2\u00a0 attractive to large private sector companies who have interests in running health services.\u00e2\u20ac\u0165<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u015bThe fact the only funding given to health is to put money into STPs gives us concerns about [the government\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s] motivation,\u00e2\u20ac\u0165 she told the Independent last week<\/a>. \u00e2\u20ac\u015bSTPs are quite sneaky in themselves. There are no structures, no accountability… It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all very shady.\u00e2\u20ac\u0165<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After the government launched a concerted drive to recruit more health visitors \u00e2\u20ac\u201c whose numbers had over the years become dangerously low \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a disaster was averted, as targets set in 2011 to train more than 4,000 health visitors by 2015 were successfully hit.   But now all that hard work is under threat after […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4082,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17],"tags":[77,75,446,632],"wps_subtitle":"As health visitors \u00e2\u20ac\u0098vanish\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 will services suffer?","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/unitelive.test.igniteamt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11792"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/unitelive.test.igniteamt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/unitelive.test.igniteamt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unitelive.test.igniteamt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unitelive.test.igniteamt.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11792"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/unitelive.test.igniteamt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11792\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11793,"href":"https:\/\/unitelive.test.igniteamt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11792\/revisions\/11793"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unitelive.test.igniteamt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/unitelive.test.igniteamt.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unitelive.test.igniteamt.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unitelive.test.igniteamt.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}