Government wants to lure back former health visitors
Melanie Defries
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
The Government is urging health visitors who have left their jobs to return to the profession, as part of plans for recruiting 4,200 health visitors that are to be unveiled in the autumn.
Speaking exclusively to Nursery World at the Grove Children and Family Centre in Southwark, London, children’s minister Sarah Teather and health minister Anne Milton said that they would urge former health visitors to think about returning to the profession.
Ms Teather said, ‘We will support the increase of health visitors in a variety of ways, and we will be able to give more details of how we plan to do this later on in the year. However, the early message is to urge people to think about returning to health visiting. It’s going to be an exciting time for the profession. Health visitors are hugely important and they offer a unique mix of skills.’
Ms Milton added, ‘I think that there has been a vicious circle with health visitors. There was a shortage, which meant that health visitors would have very high caseloads, which led to more of them leaving the profession. We would like to send the message out to health visitors that we want them to come back and we want people to think about health visiting as a career. We need to make sure families get the right support at the right time. Timeliness is key.’
Plans to the boost the number of health visitors, a pre-election pledge made by the Conservatives, were included in the new Government’s coalition agreement published in May. NHS Information Centre Workforce data, published in July, showed that the number of qualified health visitors in England dropped from 8,860 to 8,705 between September 2009 and April 2010, a fall of 1.7 per cent.
David Munday, professional officer at the union Unite/CPHVA, said, ‘While we are pleased that the coalition Government recognises the importance of health visitors, we are concerned that the number of health visitors is continuing to fall, and the Government urgently needs to address this if they want to increase numbers. It will be cheaper to stop people leaving in the first place than to try to bring people back.’
He added, ‘We are still hearing of health visitors being pushed out of the doors by Primary Care Trusts who are looking to save money, despite the Government pledging to protect frontline services. We would also welcome clarity on whether the funding for increased numbers of health visitors will come from Sure Start or the NHS.’
Ms Milton and Ms Teather visited the Grove Children and Family Centre to meet with health visitors and to see the benefits for families of having multi-disciplinary teams within Sure Start centres.
