Elsevier

Public Health

Volume 141, December 2016, Pages 218-221
Public Health

Short Communication
National survey of commissioners' and service planners' views of public health nursing in the UK

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2016.09.017Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Significant aspects of what nurses do in public health is hidden or invisible.

  • Nurses' local knowledge was seen as key to accessible public health services.

  • Activities need to be articulated so the impact of service change is understood.

  • Lack of knowledge of nursing by some commissioners is inhibiting nurses’ involvement.

Introduction

Improving public health is a key policy area both in the UK and internationally. The governments across the four UK countries each have specific strategies to guide improvements in public health services, promote greater emphasis on how people can best be helped to live healthier lives and to help address the unprecedented challenges of both an increasing population and financial austerity.

Nurses are often ideally suited and uniquely placed to respond to public health challenges as they understand the particular risks of individuals but also know the population and the communities they work in.1 Traditionally in the UK public health nurses have been seen as those in specialist community roles such as health visitors, school nurses and occupational health nurses, and in some cases specialist practitioners. However, there is an increasing need for all nurses to embrace the contribution they can have to make every contact count.

During 2015, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) in the UK undertook a programme of work building on a previous project2 to showcase public health nursing (see www.nurses4PH.org.uk). As part of this wider RCN programme, a survey was conducted to explore the views of commissioners and others involved in designing and planning public health services about the nursing and midwifery contribution to public health. The aims were to explore the perceived value of nursing in public health, to better understand the roles of nurses and midwives in public health, how these roles were valued, and what and where the gaps were in public health nursing knowledge and education.

Section snippets

The survey

A national Web-based survey of commissioners, service planners and practitioners of public health services was undertaken in May 2015. The survey was developed specifically for this study and was restricted to 23 questions to ensure ease of response. The first five questions of the survey elicited demographic data. The main section was divided into three areas reflecting the elements of public health defined by the UK Faculty of Public Health3 and used a Likert scale to elicit respondents'

Is nursing involvement in public health hidden?

The public health areas that respondents most frequently perceived nurses to be ‘always’ or ‘often’ involved in were mostly associated with the domain ‘improving services’ with nurses' roles in clinical governance and clinical effectiveness featuring strongly (see Table 1). In contrast, there appeared to be least involvement associated with some aspects of the ‘health protection’ domain suggesting this is either an area for greater investment or an example of where public health nursing may be

Knowledge and skills

With regard to nurses skills and knowledge, there was a mixed picture with areas of high satisfaction found in all three public health domains (e.g. more than two-thirds of respondents were satisfied or very satisfied with nurses' skills related to domains of family and community, lifestyles, clinical effectiveness, clinical governance, and infectious diseases). However, at least a third of respondents were dissatisfied in the areas of commissioning (38%), housing and homelessness (35%), and

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the study participants for their contribution to the research; to acknowledge the contribution of Royal College of Nursing colleagues who were part of the Expert Reference Group; and the RCN Standards, Knowledge and Innovation (SKIs) team, specifically Anda Bayliss and Adrian Baker, for their assistance with the survey.

Ethical approval

Institutional approval was provided by the Royal College of Nursing. Ethical approval was not considered necessary by NHS Ethics as the project was

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