The QICN Responds to NHS 10-Year Plan

The QICN completely agrees with the three shifts cited in the NHS 10-Year Plan.

However, the plan talks about care closer to home by new teams of professionals. It would be interesting to understand who these new professionals are? In every city, town and village we already have amazing community services that keep people at home every single day.

Development of new teams would be detrimental to the incredible work they do; what we need to do is invest in the education and training of District Nurses and other professionals, but instead we are faced with the abolition of level 7 funded apprenticeships, which currently train at least 50% of all new District Nurses a year. Without a plan to compensate for this abolition, care closer to home is a pipe dream, as District Nurses are fundamental to the plan.

We already have integrated teams up and down the country and have had for many years, some already under one roof, so it is difficult to see what is new here.

There needs to be a real focus on increasing the nursing and therapy support to people in their own homes, including care homes, to ensure everyone who needs care receives it.

Currently the risks and safety issues in community are completely hidden, unlike for example ED waits, or ambulance delays.

There is no concept of how much care is not able to be undertaken every day in community, and the inherent risk this brings.  We need a clear national system for measuring this to ensure we understand the underlying capacity and demand issues, as well as the risk to quality of care and patient safety.

There needs to be a bigger focus on building in what works now and not detract from this by creating new and ‘shiny’ services. Care at home or closer to home is essential and we agree it has to be the default, but we need robust services to ensure this can happen.

Prevention

To ensure we can truly focus on prevention, we have to invest in services to ensure this happens. Instead, we have seen year on year budget cuts for public health services such as health visiting, school nursing and sexual health services. Prevention cannot happen without strong, robust public health nursing services.

The QICN is ready and willing to work with the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England to provide a strong community nursing voice and help find the solutions, to ensure we can truly deliver more care closer to home.