Drawing on contributions and input from around 9,000 nurses, midwives care staff and patients, we are delighted to launch Compassion in Practice, the new three-year plan. Our enduring values for high quality care and good health and wellbeing are set out as the ’6 Cs’ together with 6 areas for actions that will help us achieve our shared goals.
The ‘6Cs’ – care, compassion, competence, communication, courage and commitment are a statement of the constants of nursing and midwifery for a modern health and care system. They were strongly supported in our discussions with you and our final definitions reflect your ideas. This strategy is the first that explicitly reaches out to nurses and care staff across health and social care promoting high quality joined up care for older people. It is also recognises the importance of public health and the huge contribution that nurses and midwives play in improving health as well as providing high quality care..
Nurses, midwives and care staff have a key role in preventing ill health and promoting good health and wellbeing including health protection, early intervention and health promotion. This starts at the very beginning of life to give our children the best start and continues throughout the life course and as well as the supporting our specialist public health nurses and midwives our aim is to maximize the contribution of all nurses midwives and carers to improving the publics’ health by making every contact count for health and wellbeing.
We are also publishing a number of ‘strategy on a page’ visuals that show how the vision works in action for improving health
Public health nursing for children and young people
As our population lives for longer nurses and care staff are increasingly involved in supporting older people so that the extra years can be healthy years. This means working across health and care boundaries to enable people to remain active, to enjoy good physical and mental health, stay connected within their local communities and independent in their own homes, or another place of their choice, for as long as they are able. This means we must join up health and care services to provide the integrated care that people want.
We have published two ‘strategy on a page’ visuals to contribute to this work
The Nursing contribution to the dementia challenge
Take a look at these and let me know your thoughts on how we can use these to quality of care and health and wellbeing.
I would like to thank all of you who shaped this strategy – through meetings, formal responses and the fantastic use of social media (with special thanks to @wenurses).