The Policy of Health and Social Care in the United Kingdom - Essay Example

Community care and learning disability -emphasis on community nurses Introduction It has been brought to the scientific platform of facts that one in every six people exhibits learning disability and thus engages in behaviors which are challenging on the grounds of management (Kiernan & Qureshi, 1993). These challenging behavior include self-harm, aggression, over activity, infliction of harm to the adjacent environment, shouting, and socially unacceptable behavior. Emerson (1996) and colleagues have written a brief about the funding, management and staffing of the community care. As we know that the community support teams is quite a recent event that has taken place. However, quite a significant amount of sources have been directed towards this area of competitive attention. The majority of the funding by most of the teams is received by the NHS sources. The dominant role of NHS is also evident in the managerial arrangements. It was found that all the teams with steering group had NHS and most of them had social service representative. The responsibilities of steering group can be divided into those that hold their attention of the accountability to providers and managing agencies and others associated with team operation and functions. Though a wide range of professional disciplines present themselves on the teams, nursing and psychologist account for an almost 75% of all posts. This certainly provides a picture as to how much the nursing staff is of importance in the team. Description and Discussion The policy of health and social care in the United Kingdom is placing an ever- increasing focus of attention on the community as the arena for care, which holds implications for both the service providers such as nurses and for informal carers. The policy of community care has long held its interest and services for people with mental illness and physical illness. Learning disability and physical and mental frailty have long association with old age and they can be answered by the services of community care to some noticeable extent. However, the exact meaning of the term varies. Thus, community care as developed within the margins of UK holds the efficiency to partly cope with certain disabilities in the patients. In the 1970s and 1980s, the concentration over the costs and the quality of care by institutional means presented that community care polices hold the direction of their attention on the resettlement of people with learning disability and mental illness from long term hospital care. Thus, the focus of providing care was to reestablish the patient in home from hospital and to look after the need and roles that crucial to make this happen. It is with this reason that in the 1990s, the term community care started having its dwelling to describe a policy shift maintained to cap public expenditure on private residential care for older people. Hospital care at home can be defined as a level of hospital care that has been made conceivable at home and includes within its base the supplying of medical, nursing and rehabilitative services as well as those of social support and equipment. Thus, a range of facilities that are permissible in the hospital can be brought down home with prominence of good quality of health care service being provided to the patients even at home. Thus, the nurses in this case are required to address their routine work at the home of the patient. The services that hold their focus in the prevention of hospital admission by providing alternative services at home and thus facilitates early discharge from hospital through the prominent presence of appropriate nursing a care a theme can be considered as community care service being delivered at home. Both the nurses and the relatives of the patient need to play certain roles throughout the period of community care. Another important role that the carers of the patient and the community nurses play is the recurrent theme of participation both at the theoretical conceptualization of nursing practice at professional level and in the documentation of the relevant policies. The contemporary nursing practice also involves within its interior of presence the participation of patients as a crucial element. This helps the patient to gain knowledge and thus the essential know-about of his disease and its management. Several other nurses with expert knowledge in the field of community care for leaning disabilities of adults have also focused their attention on the importance of participation of the patients. . The nest point as important is that of informal care and the involvement of parents and nurses. The community nurses support parents or the informal carers in providing care to the patients with learning disability. It has been established that though community nurses can provide a good quality of care information to the informal careers they are usually contacted only at the time of extreme crisis. Thus, we believe that projection of community health care should be made on the nursing team even otherwise. Since addition of knowledge from the nurse practitioners in community care can hold benefit in the area of provision of care to the adults with learning disability. The community service care depends on several factors. One of the important factors is that community-nursing care is being delivered only on the sound prescription of the general physician. Thus, the community nursing staff holds great reliance on the other professionals for recommendation of their important service. In addition, the workload as faced by the community nurses results in their deviation from the provision of providing the required community care and thus inclusion of the informal carers within the realm of disease management. However, it should still be noted that the community care nurses could substantially provide a positive base by education to the personnel involved in the caring of the patients. The documentation about the adult with learning disability can also help enhance the chances of better treatment and more efficient presentation of the facts. The community nurse is required to be as legible and appropriate in the maintenance of documents. All this certainly adds to the care of the person with learning disability. For example, the community nurses maintain a record regarding the violent case(s) as evident in the past years of the person with learning disability. The study of this essential material certainly enrolls the nurse with greater potential to manage the patient. Such records, documents, discussions, know -about and other enriching knowledgeable material from the community nurse certainly showers support to the person with learning disability. . It is important to mention here that the platform, which holds the addressing of the needs of the patient to his carers or himself, certainly holds different relationship base. The nurses here act as partners to the cares of the patient himself. Thus, this changes the routine mode of compliance as otherwise projected essential for the nurses. Thus, education on the grounds of developing a more egalitarian or partnership approach to patients is essential for the need. The trends towards the placement of care at home rather than in the hospital certainly generalizes on the ground that the nurse is expected to hold a greater and more prominent ground of clinical practice knowledge and thus supporting means. References Emerson, E., Forrest, J., (1996) Cummunity support teams for people with learning disabilities and challenging behaviours results of a national survey.Journal of Mental Health, 5 (4). Kiernan, C. & Qureshi, H. (1993) Challenging behaviour. In: C. Kiernan (Ed.), Research to practice Implications of research on the challenging behaviour of people with learning disabilities. Kidderminster, British Institute of Learning Disabilities. Read More