RCN briefings
Policy briefings, parliamentary briefings and consultation responses on the issues that matter to nursing staff
The RCN works with government, think tanks and other stakeholders to ensure the voice of nursing is heard. You can get involved in policy development by taking part in surveys, workshops, seminars and briefings.
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15 Oct 2009
eHealth and nursing practice – Abbreviations
eHealth and nursing practice: Abbreviations and other short forms in patient/client records.
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10 Oct 2009
Shaping the future of care together
RCN 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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7 Oct 2009
The piloting of Personal Health Budgets in England
This 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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1 Oct 2009
Dealing with Knife Injuries
Many 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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22 Jul 2009
Nursing and Payment by Results
NHS 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.
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15 Jul 2009
Social enterprise in 2009
This briefing provides a background to social enterprise and an overview of the right to request policy.
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25 Jun 2009
The regulatory landscape in health and social care in England in 2009
This 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.
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11 May 2009
NHS expenditure on external consultants
In the budget for 2009, it was announced that the Department of Health will be contributing £2.3 billion in additional savings to the overall reduction in Government expenditure and borrowing. Health Secretary at the time, Alan Johnson, said:"Better quality, safe health care goes hand in hand with better value for money" and NHS Chief Executive David Nicholls has written to the NHS stating that "the value-for-money challenge will be met through delivering on our quality agenda, not instead of it." However, several reports are already suggesting that there will inevitably be cuts in frontline services, training budgets, and investment in new facilities. The RCN is constantly alerted to the impact of external financial factors on patient care in the NHS. In order to better understand how the NHS was using its resources in these uncertain economic times, the RCN wrote to over 550 NHS organisations across the UK under the Freedom of Information Act and asked for a breakdown of their expenditure on external consultants.
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8 May 2009
The assistant practitioner role
This document considers some of the key policy issues regarding the emergence of the role of the assistant practitioner in health care. They are: the remit and purpose of the role; reasons for the introduction of this role; the role in the wider health care workforce context including workforce numbers, nursing workload and the deployment of registered nurses. The nursing profession must hold a robust debate on all the above because the assistant practitioner role must be linked to a vision for both the future configuration of the nursing workforce, and the future function and contribution of nursing to health care within that.
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16 Apr 2009
A short guide to World Class Commissioning
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