School nurses replaced with health visitors

The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has warned that school nurses are at risk of being “poached” due to the government’s health visitor recruitment drive.

It says some areas are replacing school nurses with health visitors in order to meet the government’s target to recruit an extra 4,200 health visitors in England by 2015. To help combat this, the RCN has called for a “sustained investment” in school nursing after hearing that there has been “a poor investment in school health services in recent years” and recruitment freezes in some cases.

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