Government policy adviser Dr Cheryll Adams has given an impassioned speech at Oxford Health’s Children and Families’ Universal Services Conference Day in which she argued that Health Visitors and School Nurses play a vital role in shaping the health of the population.

“Health Visitors and School Nurses are right at the centre, where it all starts,” said Dr Adams. “They have an incredibly important role in detecting health needs and making sure other services can step in at the earliest possible stage.”

Both Health Visiting and School Nursing are high on the government’s agenda currently: the Health Visitor Implementation Plan, published last year, was a call to action to expand and strengthen health visiting services across the country. Meanwhile last month, the Department of Health published ‘Getting it Right for children, young people and families’, a report that set out a fresh vision for school nursing. 

Dr Adams argued that attending to a child’s health needs in the first few years of life were crucial to a child’s future wellbeing. “Both Health Visitors and School Nurses are uniquely placed in terms of their influence – who else has universal access to all children? They are in an incredibly powerful position.”

Against the backdrop of a rising birth rate, the number of working Health Visitors has declined significantly over the last two decades. The challenge, said Dr Adams, is to attract and retain a new wave of Health Visitors. Key to achieving this will be making sure that the profession gets the kudos it rightly deserves: “giving the profession back its professionalism.”

One of her themes was mental health and the role Health Visitors and School Nurses can play in making sure treatment is sought. She said that psychiatric illnesses are the commonest complication of childbearing and can present problems to both fathers and mothers; Health Visitors can be pivotal in ensuring parents are signposted to the right services. It is also known that 50 per cent of adults who suffer from mental health problems have symptoms by the time they are 14. “School Nurses can be an incredibly powerful force for making sure early invention takes place, improving mental health outcomes for children.”

The conference also saw presentations from Dr J. A. Shaw, Consultant Paediatrician at Oxford Universities Hospitals NHS Trust, and Anthea Williams, Early Years SLT Lead North.