Talk:Health visitor

Like District Nurse this can be expanded or even merged with DN, to create a "Community Nurses" article? Panthro 01:36, 9 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Certainly needs expanding. As to whether merge with DN, depends on total length of information on Community Nursing and how systems vary worldwide. I suspect that worldwide discussion of community nursing will be sufficiently large as to be the overall covering article, with HV & DN then being smaller articles (I have a hunch these are UK specific roles/terms, but I may be wrong). As UK GP I have narrow perspective on UK situation, let alone worldwide. David Ruben Talk 03:40, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Really not the same thing at all. District nurses are mainly about social care preliminaries - working out what nursing support is needed, home modifications, that sort of thing - and minor pre-arranged medical treatment that (due to eg. frailty of the patient) is more practical to deliver at home. Health visitors are mainly about prevention (known as public health), particularly occasional monitoring (on the order of several years) of the development of young children. They also keep social services informed of any suspected cases of child abuse/neglect; part of the work of Health visitors is as a sort of inspector of parents, from the point of view of the child's welfare/health.22:23, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

Health Department Nurse
This sounds like what would be a county health department nurse here in the states. I don't know if there is an article similar to this or not. Will have to check. Looks good though. Maltmomma (chat) 20:46, 12 January 2006 (UTC)


 * That's a district nurse. 22:16, 21 January 2014 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.33.16.40 (talk)

Still not clear why they're called health visitors - do they typically visit people at home? 86.134.136.87 (talk) 09:28, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Yes. They visit certain groups, classicly all families under 5 have a health visitor who visits them for the reasons in this article. However expanding the scope to include the elderly and other at risk people is a current policy. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 138.37.202.216 (talk) 01:21, 18 December 2009 (UTC)