2014 saw Independent Nurse meeting some of the most influential and important people in nursing and the NHS to discuss the crucial issues and policies directly impacting primary care nurses.
- Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, questioned many of Jeremy Hunt's decisions and concluded that this has drained the goodwill out the NHS: 'I kind of feel the NHS is on the brink now. It really is in a dangerous position right now, and it certainly couldn't have another parliament like the one we just had: cuts, privatisation, low morale, five more years of this and I think it would be gone.'
- Marina Lupari, professional officer for primary care and community nursing, gave her very first interview in the post to IN. She spoke passionately about how she would work with the RCN to champion practice and district nurses after a long gap in representation for the workforce: 'To work with a care giver to help someone stay at home has more of an impact on that person and their overall health than the one-off to the rescue work of hospital nurses and that's a clear message that needs to be given out by community nurses. Be proud.'
- Peter Carter, chief executive of the RCN, talked about how there has been too much talk from the government and not enough action to implement any of the changes that have been identified to boost the primary care nursing workforce: 'This government's techniques is to have inquiries. Now we've had all these inquiries in relation to health, we've seen the recommendations, what we've had so far is a lot of fine words and at some stage we want to see these recommendations implementations. There were 290 recommendations from the Francis Inquiry and to date very little has been implemented.'
- Viv Bennett, director of nursing at DH and PHE, told IN about how primary care nurses need to make noise around the profession in order to be heard: 'We've had a period of time where because of concerns about the acute physical ill health sector, many nurses who work in mental health, or primary and community care and learning disability have felt quite invisible, so I think there is the bigger issue on how we make all branches of nursing visible to the public and also the people that we want to be the next generation of nurses.'
- Jane Cummings, chief nursing officer at NHS England, spoke about how
many nurses are so busy with their daily practice that they are unable to find the time to look at nationwide initiatives.'I think some [practice nurses] are really engaged with [the 6Cs] and some others maybe not as much. It's about being able to get into that network of practice nurses across the country and we know that some may find it more difficult to step out of there day to day work to look at some of the things going on outside that immediate field.'
To watch the full videos of all of our interviews and more visit our video section.