HEALTH chiefs look set to cut district nursing services in Scarborough following a review which says the area has too many highly qualified members of staff. Local doctor Phil Garnett, chairman of the GP consortium for Scarborough, Filey and parts of Ryedale, says bosses are proposing to cut £800,000 from the budget for district nurses.

He said: “The York and North Yorkshire Primary Care Trust, PCT, have carried out a review of district nursing services across the county.

“They say that their review has revealed our area has a higher level of senior district nurses than other parts of the county and they want to reduce that number.

“We are very concerned about these proposals and the effect they may have on patient care.

“Our district nurses are very experienced and the service they provide actually saves money because they can keep patients out of hospital by treating them in their own homes.”

Dr Garnett said that he and the chairmen of two other GP groups in the area had written to Janet Soo Chung, chief executive of the PCT, to ask for a meeting to discuss the issue.

The PCT's director of operations, Janet Probert, said: “During the development of our service modernisation and financial recovery programme, and because four organisations were being merged to create a new county-wide primary care trust, we looked in detail at the work being carried out by our community nurses.

“One of the issues we faced was that community nurses had different responsibilities in different parts of the county. We must ensure that patients, wherever they live in North Yorkshire, can receive the same levels of care.

“Community nurses are highly skilled and have the experience and expertise to deal with a wide range of patients' needs.

“The survey we carried out identified that in some areas highly skilled community nurses were often doing tasks that could have been done by other members of staff.

“By redistributing the workload so that certain tasks such as administrative duties, taking blood samples and parenting support are carried out by competent support workers, we can better use the skills and experience of community nurses to benefit those patients who need the support most.

“Our top priority is, and will remain, safe patient care and at no point will this be put at risk. No members of staff are being asked to carry out duties for which they are not fully trained and patients can be reassured that they will get the care they need delivered by a member of staff with the relevant skills.”