Who needs health visitors?

Post-natal depression

Our local PCT has, over the last two or three years, spent a large amount of taxpayers’ money funding respiratory-nurse specialists, cardiac-nurse specialists and "insert any job better done by a doctor” nurse specialists to “assist” GPs working in the community.

This has been Patricia Hewitt’s agenda, and directives have been sent down to the PCTs who have no alternative but to act.

Of course, no one asked the GPs what sort of help they needed in the community. Who are we to make such judgements?

And so we come to the Cinderellas of NHS community care. The Health Visitors. Dr Crippen has always liked Health Visitors. They do not try to do my job. They have their own defined roles and very valuable roles they are too. They have been around for so long that most people have forgotten they exist. Indeed, if you have not had a baby recently or if you are male, you may never have heard of them. They were the original nurse-specialists, though that phrase had not been invented at the time.

What do they do?

Simple stuff. They keep an eye on new-born babies and their mothers. Paediatric surveillance. Picking up the early signs of post-natal depression, still one of the most scandalously under-treated conditions in the country. Dealing with feeding problems. Breast care. The list is long.

Our health visitors are understaffed and overworked. The senior one retired last year. She has not been replaced.

And so they are having to cut down on the number of visits they do to new mothers and babies. They do not have time for all the developmental assessments. That teenage sexual advice clinic they were running is going to have to go.

Patricia’s focus groups have probably not heard of health-visitors, so Patricia has probably not heard of them either. Nurse-specialists, on the other hand, are popular even if they are largely superfluous.

That is the way New Labour cookie crumbles.