Nursery World - Opinion: In my View - Save the health visitors

I am passionate about health visiting because it has a positive impact on children and their families.

But this 145-year-old tradition of community nursing is facing a bleak time, with job losses, recruitment freezes and cuts to training places for future health visitors.

But according to government policies since 1997, this crisis in health visiting should not be happening. Not since the Attlee government of 1945 have ministers announced such an array of family-orientated social welfare initiatives. Billions more in real terms has been poured into the NHS over the past decade.

Yet research from Unite/Community Practitioners' and Health Visitors' Association shows that one health visitor is being lost every day and that training places for them have been axed by more than 40 per cent in the last two years.

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