Prescription for nursing informatics in pre-registration nurse education.

Nurses need to be able to use information and communications technology not only to support their own practice, but also to help their patients make best use of it. This article argues that nurses are not currently adequately prepared to work with information and technology through their pre-registration education. Reflecting the lack of nursing informatics expertise, it is recommended that all pre-registration nursing programmes should have access to a nursing informatics specialist. A prescription to meet the informatics needs of the newly qualified nurse is proposed. This places the areas that need to be included in pre-registration education into broad groups that both articulate the competencies that nurses need to develop, and indicate why they are needed, rather than providing context-free checklists of skills. This is presented as a binary scatter chart with two axes, skill to knowledge and technology to information

Changes in the provision of long-stay care, 1970-1990

The objective of this paper is to map out the changes in the public, private and voluntary provision of long-stay care for elderly people and younger people with a physical handicap, people with a mental handicap and people with a mental illness in Britain over the period 1970–1990. It is also designed to bring together in a convenient form all the relevant data which are not readily available because they are published in several disparate sources. The effects on the social security budget of the expansion of private residential and nursing homes are described. National trends in provision show a marked increase in private residential and nursing homes and indicate how private provision has taken up an increasing number of people aged 65 years or over and has substituted for public provision with the closure of the hospitals for people with a mental illness or a mental handicap. The income support payments to people in independent homes increased, at 1990 prices, from $33 million in 1980 to$1390 million in 1990. The implications of this changing balance of care in terms of choice, efficiency and equity are examined in the concluding section. There is some evidence that the growth of the independent sector has increased consumer choice and improved efficiency in the provision of long-stay care but at some cost to those people who would have been provided with free NHS facilities but now have to contribute to the costs of their care

Current educational challenges for specialist community public health nurses following a health-visiting pathway and the consequences of these challenges for public health

The UK Standing Conference on Specialist Community Public Health Nurse Education represents the interests of those most intimately involved with specialist community public health nurse (health visitor) (SCPHN (HV)) education in higher education institutions across the UK. This paper summarizes issues currently affecting the education of SCPHN (HV)s and the delivery of health visiting and public health nursing services across the UK. Difficulties in recruitment, numbers of practice teachers and tensions created by the gap between expected and actual practice roles for health visitors are discussed. This discussion takes place in the context of the Programme of Action on Health Visiting, which was launched in 2009 by the Department of Health in England. Recommendations for action by HEIs are made in response to the difficulties identified in particular. Although this paper applies to all the UK SCPHN education programmes the majority of these are in England, which has resulted in a focus being placed on challenges in England