Election 2019: Health visitors welcome Labour pledge to boost workforce
Fiona Simpson
Thursday, November 14, 2019
Health visitors have welcomed a Labour Party pledge to increase the number of health visitors and school nurses by 4,800.
The Institute of Health Visiting (IHV) has called on other parties to ensure that their manifestos "contain similar commitments".
It warned that "children in the UK have some of the worst outcomes when compared to the rest of Europe and similar countries across the world".
"It's time for all political parties to take this seriously," the IHV said.
In June, the IHV issued a stark warning that health visiting services in many parts of England were being "eroded" due to funding cuts by councils.
It called for the government to ringfence funding for health visiting services as well as increase training budgets for student health visitors, saying there had been a "significant deterioration" since 2015 in the quality and quantity of provision in many parts of England.
iHV welcomes @UKLabour manifesto pledge to increase the number of health visitors and hopes that the other parties’ manifestos will contain similar commitments @Conservatives @LibDems @TheGreenParty https://t.co/AKdutFelZr#healthvisiting
— iHV (@iHealthVisiting) 13 November 2019
The Local Government Association has also recently said an urgent workforce strategy should be developed.
The latest figures from NHS Digital showed there were 7,694 health visitors in England in January this year, a drop of 25 per cent since numbers topped more than 10,000 in 2015.
Responding to plans by Suffolk Council to cut health visitor numbers by 25 per cent earlier this year, the IHV said: "Health visiting services are being diluted and eroded due to a persistent gap between what the evidence tells us and we aspire to achieve, and what is currently funded and provided.
"Health visiting is a role and service focused on promoting health, identifying hidden risk and needs, and offering families early support to reduce potential long-term negative health and social outcomes for their children."
Figures published in the Royal College of Nursing report The Best Start: The Future of Children's Health One Year On also showed the number of school nurses employed full-time by the NHS fell by 23 per cent - or 680 jobs - between March 2010 and January 2018.
The pledge came as part of Labour's bid to invest £26bn into the NHS to "provide safe quality care, recruit the thousands of staff needed, rebuild crumbling facilities and provide modern state-of-the-art equipment".
The party also revealed plans to increase spending on services for children aged five and under by £75m and expand GP training places to 5,000 to create 27 million more appointments with family doctors.