Policy briefings
2009 briefings
Policy and International produce briefings on a wide range of issues which affect nurses and nursing. The briefings listed below are those produced in 2009.
Some files on this page are in PDF format - see how to access PDF files.
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Published: 16 Dec 2009 - PDF File 421.1 KBThe purpose of this briefing is to provide members with a background to key issues relating to the access of NHS IVF treatment in the UK. It also sets out the implications for nursing and the RCN's recommendations.
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Published: 19 Nov 2009 - PDF File 572.1 KBA roundtable discussion on Nursing and the economic downturn was held on 25 August 2009 at RCN headquarters in London. An invitation only meeting, it brought together prominent figures in nursing together with leading external thinkers and influencers who ordinarily have relatively little direct involvement in developing nursing policy. The roundtable was held in order to explore issues further regarding the creation of a Commission on the Future of Nursing and Midwifery in England, which was announced on 17 March by the Prime Minister. This paper, summarising the discussions, will be submitted to the Commission and will inform the work of the RCN Policy Unit in influencing health and social care policy. The RCN has also submitted five papers on each of the Commission's work streams which you can download from the 'Breifings 2010' page, under Report by the Prime Minister's Commission.
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Published: 10 Oct 2009 - PDF File 65.5 KBRCN members are being encouraged to complete a short online survey to share their views on the future of social care in England. This will ensure that The RCN is responding to the Government Green Paper Shaping the Future of Care Together, which calls for a care debate and includes the idea of setting up a 'National Care Service'. The Government has ruled out paying for a new system through increasing taxes but has proposed three options for funding. The RCN has prepared a RCN Policy Briefing 12/2009: 'Shaping the future of care together' to explain the key issues and assist RCN members with formulating their response. The RCN ran a survey to gather views in order to shape its response and this consultation closed on 31 October 2009.
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Published: 07 Oct 2009 - PDF File 58.8 KBThis briefing provides a short introduction to the possible role of personal health budgets within health care. The Department of Health in England is planning to begin a pilot programme on personal health budgets in early 2010. This follows on from the NHS Next Stage Review which pledged to pilot personal health budgets in selected areas as a way of giving patients greater control over the services they receive. The briefing, prepared jointly by the RCN's Employment Relations Department and the Policy Unit, is intended to provide an overview of the implications for this system of healthcare funding, outline the timetable for the pilot programme and summarise the current RCN position on personal health budgets.
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Published: 01 Oct 2009 - PDF File 68.7 KBMany nurses are unaware of their rights and obligations concerning the reporting of knife enabled crime to the police. With reference to recent changes to guidance given to doctors by the General Medical Council, and in response to nurses concerns, this updated document explains some of the medico-legal, ethical and professional issues behind disclosing information and looks at the importance of the nursing role in several innovative schemes designed to tackle the problem of knife crime.
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Published: 22 Jul 2009 - PDF File 238.6 KBNHS England has been reimbursing providers for acute care using an activity based casemix payment system called Payment by Results (PbR) since 2003. PbR uses Healthcare Resource Groups (HRGs) as a means of classifying patients' treatment episodes for reimbursement. They are developed by clinical working groups from national data and are designed to group together episodes that are clinically coherent and consume similar amounts of resource. Within PbR, although efforts have been made to engage clinicians in the gathering of data, nursing costs are still treated purely as a workforce cost which is aggregated to the unit or department level and allocated on the basis of the amount of time the patient spent in that unit (for e.g. theatre hours or bed days). Within that 'pooled cost', there is little recognition of variations in nursing effort/inputs, patient dependency, and skill. In order to begin to illustrate any connections between nursing costs and the resources given to providers under PbR, the RCN commissioned a study which observed around 117,000 nursing activities on 60 wards over a 48 hour period. This activity was then converted to a daily cost to compare with PbR reimbursement. This study is the first time that patient dependency has been linked with HRGs and proposes that further work needs to be done to address the invisibility of nursing within PbR if it is to achieve its policy goals of driving efficiency and improving the quality of patient care.
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Published: 15 Jul 2009 - PDF File 78.7 KBThis briefing provides a background to social enterprise and an overview of the right to request policy.
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Published: 25 Jun 2009 - PDF File 208.4 KBThis briefing sets out the range and scope of 'regulators' in the health and social care sector in England. Its aim is to outline who does what in regulating, inspecting, auditing and contributing to setting standards in health and social care in the new regulatory landscape.
Total number: 18