We have an exciting week ahead to focus on nurses and midwives and their vital contribution to high quality practice in all care and in specialist health protection services to keep people safe. We will be making this vital contribution 'visible’ during this week. In doing so we can celebrate success and identify challenges and the best way of dealing with them. We have a range of events, activities and social media and I am very excited to be working with NHS Change Day on our campaign, 'Protecting Health: Vital and Visible' (read about and join our campaign pledge at http://bit.ly/1bsvckc or Protecting Health Campaign Pledge), @WeNurses on a twitter chat, 'Health Protection Every Nurses' Role' (to join the chat go to http://bit.ly/Odfb7F) and with the RCN, RCM, Nursing Standard, Nursing Times, Independent Nurse, Institute of Health Visiting, 6Cs Live and others over the course of the week. I am also very pleased that we have blogs from many experts in nursing, midwifery and public health contributing to the week. We are focusing on some specific health protection priorities through the week, including Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR)/Healthcare Acquired Infections (HCAI), Immunisation and TB. On Friday we will look at wider resilience, for example, building resilience to protect mental health.
I hope that as a consequence of this week and our campaign for NHS Change Day we will all better be able to:
• Understand the importance of interventions at patient, community and population level to protect health and build resilience and use this to inform our practice
• Celebrate the successes in health protection
• Identify the main challenges and ensure that nurses and midwives are prepared for these – e.g., new immunisation programmes and the National Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) strategy
• Ensure that nurses and midwives contribution to protecting heath is valued and supported
• Support all nurses and midwives in making the best possible contribution to health protection in all specialities and in all settings
Thank you for your involvement
Viv Bennett
Director of Nursing
Department of Health/Public Health England
Follow Viv on Twitter @VivJBennett
