New public health funding is welcome but more ringfenced support is needed to protect and improve the role and workloads of school nurses, a leading school nursing association has said.
The government recently announced a £200m funding boost for public health, with local authorities being given additional funding for family and school nurses, sexual health clinics and other public health services in their areas.
The investment is part of the government’s ‘Plan for Change’, which aims to shift from sickness to prevention and deliver more care in the community.
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Funding for public health grants will be increased to £3.858 billion – a 5.4% cash uplift (3% in real terms) on last year’s funding.
Sallyann Sutton, professional officer at the School and Public Health Nurses Association (SAPHNA), said the organisation ‘welcomes’ the increase as a ‘first step forward’ but warned school nursing needs more secure funding commitments for the long-term.
‘Ideally we would want to see a percentage of that money [public health grant funding] guaranteed to improve and support the development of school nursing services,’ Ms Sutton told Nursing in Practice.
She warned that the increase ‘won’t make up for the years of cuts to the public health grant’, especially given the ‘competition’ between different aspects of public health, such as smoking cessation and tackling obesity.
‘If it [the funding] isn’t ring fenced to school nursing, then there is a big risk that it will get sucked up and into other agendas. There is a risk, then, that it doesn’t help us move forward with school nursing,’ she added.
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Ms Sutton explained that funding issues were also impacting people considering a career in school nursing.
‘If you know that a service is struggling or is underfunded, that is likely to have an impact on recruitment – it certainly has an impact on retention.’
According to the Health Foundation, the public health grant has been cut by 26% on a real terms per person since 2015/16.
The Health Foundation estimates that children’s services have seen some of the largest reductions in spend over this period, with an around 25% reduction since 2015/16.
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And the Local Government Association (LGA) is calling on the government to set out a long-term sustainable funding strategy for public health in this year’s Spending Review.
Last year, a SAPHNA report revealed the impact of the ‘continuous reduction’ to the public health grant and warned of ‘significant regional variation’ in funding allocations.
