Government plans to move care from acute hospitals to community settings have been criticised by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), as a survey of community nurses showed that many are facing cutbacks and spending less time with patients.
The RCN said that, while the shift from acute hospitals to community care has been given as a justification for NHS posts being lost from hospitals in the past, the survey demonstrated that community services are also overburdened, underinvested and at risk from cutbacks. The RCN warned that this risked producing a ‘revolving door’ for patients, who are discharged from hospital only to find that the support is not there in the community. Many then have to be readmitted to hospital at great expense because support at home is simply unavailable. The RCN survey of community nurses found that fewer than one in ten (6%) said they always had time to meet the needs of their patients, while almost all (89%) said that their case load had increased over the last year. Nearly six in ten (59%) reported that they were spending less time with their patients than they did a year ago, raising major concerns for the capacity of community services to deal with an increasing number of acutely ill patients. Dr Peter Carter, chief executive and general secretary of RCN, commented: “We want care to be delivered closer to home, and we want community nurses to be empowered to keep their patients out of hospital, but at the moment this shift in the way care is delivered is simply a façade...”
