Eastern region
Karen Webb, RCN Regional Director for the Eastern Region
New contact number for Eastern Region Office
The RCN Eastern Region Office will have a new telephone number with effect from 05 March 2012. The new number will be used by all RCN members when making initial contact with the office. Your call will be answered by an adviser at RCN Direct who will give you all the information you need to refer you to the relevant member of staff if additional advice is required.
If you have an ongoing case, you can continue to use the direct-dial number that you have been given by the member of staff who has been helping you.
By having your telephone call answered at RCN Direct, you will never have a call go unanswered. Update your records today and you don't need to worry about additional costs as wherever you are in the UK, you will always be charged at the local number rate.
Telephone 0345 772 6100 to contact the Eastern Region with effect from 05 March, 8:30am to 8.30pm 7 days a week
Go to RCN Direct online www.rcn.org.uk/direct for advice and information .
Pressures on clinical practice
Whatever your clinical specialty, we would like to hear from you about the issues that matter to you, and work with you to ensure the best care for patients. Recently the RCN has strongly advised that the Care Quality Commission inspectorate take account of skill mix and staffing levels alongside other factors. As nurses and health practitioners, we have been bruised by a number of terrible reports and exposures of poor practice.
We want the best for our patients, and we want safe and supportive clinical leadership and management for ourselves. We know that in almost every area of clinical practice the client group is becoming more elderly and frail. This group of patients need more time from us, more skilled assessment of their needs and more staff with better levels of understanding of complex care to be able to meet their needs with competence, compassion, care and dignity. Here at the RCN Eastern region we want to know if you feel that your clinical establishment is not good enough, and if you find that your staff are constantly taken away from you to cover other areas and not back-filled when your patients need your skills.
The value of RCN representatives
Here in the Eastern region we value our local accredited RCN representatives. Every representative - steward, safety rep or learning rep has access to monthly development and supervision support from staff, and every accredited representative supporting a member at an investigatory, disciplinary, grievance or health meeting, providing learning and development opportunities, investigating a slip, trip, assault or injury is vital to the RCN. But RCN representatives are not just vital to us - directors of nursing, directors of human resources and chief executives here in the Eastern region say that RCN accredited representatives are vital to their organisations too. Without local volunteer RCN activists to support their trusts and care facilities, clinics and companies, solutions take longer to achieve, which takes us back to the fundamental issues - time, money and care.
Why not think about becoming an accredited representative and helping RCN members and your own organisation to provide the best care for patients and the best environment in which to provide it? If you would like to become a rep, please contact the regional office as below.
Royal College of Nursing
Eastern Region
Abbotsgate House
Hollow Road
Bury St Edmunds
Suffolk
IP32 7AU
Tel: 0345 772 6100 Fax: 01284 717737
Email: eastern.region@rcn.org.uk
If you need to visit the the Eastern region office, based in Bury St Edmunds, here are the directions and location (Word 211KB).
Join the RCN
If you want to join the RCN, you can get information about full membership, health care assistant membership or student or retired membership, from the Benefits of membership section. You can also join online using MyRCN.