A view from here - extended version

Rachel Hollis
Lead Nurse Children's Cancer, Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust, Yorkshire, and Chair of the Children and Young People’s Specialist Care Forum

Yorkshire is of course ‘God’s own county’, so we are delighted to welcome colleagues back to Congress in Harrogate. It is a good opportunity for us to showcase the fine Yorkshire scenery, the hospitality of the people and the good local ales.

This year’s Congress is a great opportunity for nursing staff within Yorkshire to get to see more of what goes on in the College and how the agenda really steers the RCN’s work. Lots of local members will be there and act as ambassadors for both the RCN and the region.

I will be proposing a resolution for the Children and Young People’s Specialist Care Forum asking Council to oppose service redesign which results in the loss or fragmentation of specialist knowledge, expertise or staff.

My proposition will be focused on children and young people and other vulnerable groups. We are concerned that at times of major service reorganisation children’s services do not receive a high enough priority. This can be the case in big, acute, busy trusts, where services for adults tend to take priority and the particular needs of children and families can be overshadowed.

At the national level, while there has been a lot of work around certain critical areas such as paediatric heart surgery and neurosurgery, specialist services for children have received scant attention in the Health and Social Care Bill.

We believe there is a lack of recognition at both commissioner and provider level of the breadth of specialities within children’s health care services. Changes to commissioning risk further fragmentation of children’s pathways which have been developed through managed networks of care. My particular speciality is children’s cancer, where children make up less than one per cent of the cancer population; they have specialist care needs and care pathways that cut across primary, secondary and tertiary care.

It will be good to take the resolution to the platform, but having not proposed a resolution before, I’m a little nervous about it. But I am looking forward to the debate, hearing from members from different areas, and giving people the opportunity to raise concerns from their own particular, diverse fields of practice.