Hansard

I am proud to join other members in celebrating international nurses day. I thank Emma Harper for securing the debate, for her contribution to nursing and for sharing her passion and expertise on the issue.

Nurses throughout our national health service and social care system do truly heroic work. We must celebrate their achievements and thank them for their dedication and tireless care. From our neonatal units to our hospices, nurses care for the most vulnerable and lead increasingly complex care in community settings. I also thank all our healthcare support workers for the vital work that they do alongside our nursing staff to support patients. In the time that I have available, I will focus on the tremendous impact that nurses have on children and young people’s health.

Sadly, not every family can take their newborn baby straight home from hospital, and one in 10 babies who are born in Scotland will be admitted to a neonatal unit. Neonatal nurses deliver very technically skilled care and support families through unimaginably stressful experiences. However, recent surveys that have been led by Bliss show, unfortunately, that too many neonatal nurses are not getting the protected time that they need for training and professional development. We should have comprehensive standards for nurses becoming qualified in their specialty and developing further in specialised clinical practice areas, but we must ensure that nurses have real opportunities to develop their skills, and good staffing ratios are key to that.

As our children grow older and move into education, school nurses provide child-centred primary care and can play a key role in tackling health inequalities in childhood. School nurses are trusted, they are well-placed to help schools and families with income-maximisation advice and they provide universal, non-stigmatising mental health support. The Government has indicated that school nurses will start to take on a refocused role this year or in 2018 and will work more with children who have additional support needs and with young carers and looked-after children. I hope that the minister can update us on the progress of those plans.

Strengthening preventative healthcare in schools is essential, because we are seeing real increases in the number of children and young people with mental health problems and children and young people who need intensive emotional support. Nurses make up over 40 per cent of the total child and adolescent mental health services workforce, and demands on the sector are intense. The Royal College of Nursing has called for continued additional investment in CAMHS to enhance early intervention and preventative work, and to ensure that there is a well-trained and well-supported workforce.

Nurses who work in our communities are at the very centre of early intervention. I support the expansion of the family nurse partnership programme, which is an important preventative health programme that gives younger first-time mothers additional support during pregnancy and through the baby’s early years. Evaluations show that that approach improves antenatal health, promotes strong attachment, and leads to better health and developmental outcomes for children. That is all because of the therapeutic relationship between specialist nurses and new parents. Making that focused support available to more parents aged up to 24 is a good step forward.

The key relationship between nurses and patients is at the heart of our health service, and I am proud to celebrate it and to ensure that it is at the centre of our health and social care system in the future. We know that there are real challenges in recruitment and retention in Scotland, and we must do more to provide more training opportunities in remote and rural areas and attract new entrants to the profession a bit later in life.

Due to demographic changes, the role that nurses play in supporting the elderly and vulnerable will change, too. We know that a high level of nursing posts are vacant in our care homes and that, as health and social care become more integrated, we must have robust workforce planning to ensure that nurses can support people well in their homes for longer.

It is often said that we have more statues of animals than statues of women in the city of Edinburgh. As the deputy convener of the cross-party group on animal welfare, I welcome those statues of animals, but we could do far more. Last year, a plaque was unveiled in Edinburgh to commemorate 500 nurses who died during world war 1. The sacrifice and the contribution that nurses have made are often overlooked in this society, and I would certainly welcome a campaign to recognise that with a statue in Edinburgh.