District nurses now ‘endangered’

The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) said numbers could fall dramatically by 2025.

In the last decade, there has been a 47 per cent reduction in numbers of district nurses working in communities across England, according to research by the national nursing research unit at King’s College London.

The NHS and successive governments have said that care needs to be taken out of hospitals and delivered closer to home.

But the study, commissioned by the RCN, found that of the district nurses left, a third of the workforce are over 50 and nearing retirement.

To plug the gap, an additional 10,000 district nurses are needed across the country, the RCN said.

A spokeswoman said that this is the “only way” to meet the demands of an ageing population.

The research, which saw 2,400 district and community nurses polled, found that most community staff are “pushed to breaking point”.

A quarter said they had seen more than 12 patients on their last shift, meaning the time actually spent with the patient was stretched, she added.

Many of those questioned raised concerns about the time spent with patients, with the nurses on average spending just 37 per cent of their time delivering care. And eight out of 10 said they had worked additional hours on their last shift.

Peter Carter, chief executive of the RCN which is holding its annual congress in Liverpool, said: “The district nurse role is the foundation of a system which should be able to manage conditions and keep sick and frail people at home. Remove those foundations and the whole edifice could come crashing down.

“The NHS, and the people who run it, have long paid lip service to the ideal of moving care closer to home. But many people up and down the country are still in need of expert care from district nurses.

“By 2025, there will be many thousands of families with frail older relatives, who may well have survived a number of illnesses – and when they look for help to manage at home, it simply won’t be there.

“When expert care at home is not available for vulnerable or dying people, the end result is unnecessary hospital admissions which are both expensive and distressing.”

A Department of Health spokeswoman said more nurses were being employed on wards.

“We now need to make sure this happens across the NHS and in the community,” she said.

“That’s why the chief nursing officer has set up a working group which is looking specifically at what we can do to increase the number of community nurses and we are committed to training 10,000 more frontline community staff by 2020.”

Hospital bosses in Sheffield yesterday announced more than 130 new nurses will staff its wards this autumn in investment worth £1.5m. The moves comes over rising demand from sicker and more dependent patients.

Chief nurse Prof Hilary Chapman at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said: “This requires us to modify the level and type of nursing care we provide.

“For many years we have regularly monitored the number of nurses we think we need to care for patients based on these factors. The £1.5m investment is part of this planning to ensure we provide the right level of nursing care, in the right place and at the right time.”