Improving community nursing numbers

The Queen's Nursing Institute (QNI) and Royal College of Nursing (RCN) (2019) called for urgent investment in district nursing as they identified a dramatic 43% reduction in the number of district nurses working in the NHS! It is astonishing that, although 90% of all patient contacts are in the community (QNI, 2012), there is a fierce concentration on ‘front door’ (emergency department) activity, rather than the activity at the patient's front door.

Our local universities have seen a recent increase in the uptake of nurse training positions, which might be a positive from the pandemic, when the NHS staff were hailed as heroes. However, the gaps in our day-to-day establishment remain. What can we do differently to attract nurses to work in the community? I have thought long and hard about this over the past few months and, of course, have written a strategy for recruitment, but I still yearn for those innovative strategies that make community nursing stand out from the rest!