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Listen
Foreword
by the Minister for Health and Community Care
Nurses have a proud tradition of providing services to Scotland's communities. No one can doubt the esteem in which they are held by the countless individuals and families they have supported through the generations. In many ways, nurses are seen as being crucial to the delivery of high-quality community-based services.
But the challenges nurses face in community settings today are very different from those of their predecessors. More different still will be the challenges faced by tomorrow's nurses.
Central to the positioning of Scotland as a modern, enterprising, culturally diverse nation is the issue of health. Our health policy statement, Delivering for Health, sets in place the infrastructure for an NHS in Scotland that is designed to meet individual and community needs and improve the health of the entire nation.
The policy emphasises that the community is going to be the setting for health care in Scotland in the future. People live, raise families, go to schools and work in their communities. They have a right to expect to receive their health care in their communities as well.
This Review of Nursing in the Community therefore makes a vital contribution to the process of implementing the Delivering for Health policy throughout the country. It presents a refreshingly honest analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of current nursing services in the community, identifying the key elements of the nursing role that must be nurtured and developed to enable nurses to play their full part in meeting the nation's health needs. It then sets out a model to underpin community nursing practice that will be launched in Development Sites in NHS Boards in the near future.
The Review leaves me in no doubt about three crucial things. Firstly, that nurses in the community are central to the success of our policy for the NHS. Secondly, that nurses have the integrity, the courage and the determination not only to analyse their practices critically and constructively, but also to make the changes their analysis demands. And thirdly, the new model proposed in this report is the right way ahead for community nursing services in Scotland.
I can state these views with confidence, because when I read the nursing agenda, I see the patient's agenda. This Review has listened very carefully to what patients and carers think and feel about community nursing, and it is now acting to deliver to them the services they want. There can be no greater commendation of a heath profession, in my view, than a willingness to put patients' and carers' concerns first every time.
I am very excited about the future of nursing in the community under the new model, and look forward eagerly to seeing progress in the Development Sites. Nurses, not for the first time in their long and illustrious history, have stood up to be counted, and that's something for which we should all be grateful.
Andy Kerr, MSP
Minister for Health and Community Care
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