Nursing people at home is a special skill that requires support

Nursing people at home has always been a special skill. It is very different from nursing people in hospital beds, or in clinical type settings outside of hospital, such as GP surgeries and health centres. The real point at which care changes fundamentally is when it crosses the patient's doorstep. To provide high quality nursing care to people in their own homes requires particular skills, knowledge and approaches - and the development of these has been seriously neglected in recent years. These are the basic tenets of the new report from the Queen's Nursing Institute (QNI) (2011), which was launched at the House of Lords in November 2011. The evidence for the report was gathered throughout the first year of the QNI's Right Nurse, Right Skills campaign, which was supported by BJCN. As part of the campaign, both nurses and members of the public were invited to leave stories and comments on a special webpage, and hundreds of people did so. The nurses talked about the replacement of registered nurses with health-care assistants, and the influx of inexperienced nurses who were not given the support they needed to develop community skills. Patients and carers spoke of their experiences of care - most of the time, these were good or excellent. However, too often, care was delivered by nurses or assistants who lacked the right skills to prevent harm or deliver care properly. The results were sometimes discomfort, sometimes unnecessary suffering, and occasionally very serious.