School nurses 'poached to meet health visitors target'

Earlier this year, the government’s health visitor implementation plan outlined proposals to expand and rejuvenate the health visiting service.

It pledged that every children’s centre should have access to a named health visitor and estimated that 6,000 additional health visitors will need to be trained between now and 2015.

As part of the plans, NHS PCTs and strategic health authorities have been charged with recruiting these health visitors.

But Sharon White, professional officer at Saphna, said health authorities are cutting funding for school nursing training and actively poaching qualified health visitors currently working as school nurses to try to meet the target.

"Saphna is increasingly concerned at the number of members who are informing us that school nursing is being targeted and placed at even further risk to support the implementation of the health visitor call to action plan," she explained.

One member of the union with 25 years' experience in school nursing described the behaviour of her local PCT as "outrageous".

"School nurses have been individually targeted and offered a financial reward of £1,000 if they ‘elope’ and become health visitors," the member said.

Another warned that school nursing budgets are being raided to fund the health visitor implementation plan.

"Some of the school nursing monies have been taken to pay for the immunisation team, which has been integrated into the health visiting service," the school nurse explained. "The way management appears to have explained this is that we are a birth to 19 service, therefore the staff can be utilised across all areas."

School nurses are "angry and dismayed" at the effect the health visitor implementation plan is having on the school nursing workforce, according to another experienced Saphna member.

"There are tales of ‘temporary’ contracts being offered to school nurses, however, these will be made ‘permanent’ if they transfer to health visiting," the member said. "Those who are working as school nurses but who are also qualified health visitors are being poached and coerced by managers who have to fulfil unrealistic numbers and recruit into health visiting."

The school nurse, who is also a qualified health visitor, added: "I am disillusioned beyond words and I call on the government and the chief nursing officer to act immediately to prevent the widening of a divide that we have worked tirelessly to seam."

Last year the public health minister Anne Milton pledged to set up a development programme for the school nursing profession.

The Department of Health (DoH) is also in the process of developing a new "vision for school nursing" to reflect its broad public health role.

A spokesman for the department said that local healthcare providers should ensure they have a suitably skilled workforce that can meet the needs of children and young people within their community.

He said: "School nurses are a vital element of the public health nursing and children's service workforce, and their skills and expertise. Health visitors clearly focus on the 0-5 years, while school nurses work with and support school-aged children and young people, both to improve health outcomes and to support children with illness and disability in school."

He added: "We have a development programme in place working with the profession, partners and young people themselves around these two key areas to ensure we have a workforce that can seamlessly support children from 0-19.

"Where it is relevant, we will align the elements of the health visitor implementation plan with the development programme for school nursing services."