A SHORTAGE of staff means health visitors in Swindon are struggling to see the number of children they ought to.

Councillors on the borough council’s children’s health, care and education overview and scrutiny committee will be told that there are less than two thirds of the necessary ‘frontline’ health visiting staff to make calls on very young children and their parents.

A report by the principal health and wellbeing officer at Euclid Street, Katie Currie, will tell councillors five visits are mandated – an ante-natal visit at 28 weeks, one for newborns at 10-14 days, another at six to eight weeks, one at 12 months and the last at between 24 and 30 months.

The two most important visits are those to new born babies and at 24 to 30 months, but the frequency of the latter visits has been dropping: “Reviews reached 68.8 per cent for January-March 2019, a decrease from 74.9 per cent for October to December 2018.”

Of the 38.5 frontline health visitors, there are 6.1 full-time equivalent vacancies unfilled, with 4.69 full-time staff on maternity leave and 2.8 on long-term sick leave: “This equates to 35 per cent of the front line establishment not being available to deliver the Healthy Child Programme.”

Mum-of-four Lorraine Pengilley. who lives in Redhouse in north Swindon, said: “I’ve just checked and my daughter was seen when she was six weeks old, and not since, and she’s two now.

“A friend says her son had his two-year check a year late.

“I think it’s too long to go between six weeks and three years.

“My two eldest children both had to have operations when they were very young, and those issues were picked up by health professionals, and not me.

“It shows that things will be missed if visits aren’t made.”

A Swindon Borough Council spokesman said: “There is a shortage of health visitors nationally and the Local Government Association recently revealed that the number of health visitors working in local authorities had fallen by 20 per cent over the last few years.

"Despite this challenging position, we are actively recruiting new health visitors and we have a programme in place to develop the skills of other staff to increase our resource to support families.

“We have developed the roles of early years practitioners and community staff nurses, who are able to work with health visitors to deliver the Healthy Child Programme to families”

“We are also offering funded training so we train our own heath visitors and are less reliant on having to compete with other providers in an already crowded market place.”