Nurse specialists have become a controversial addition to the workings of the NHS. They are designed to ease the pressures upon doctors by carrying out some of their roles for them but some people have argued that this is merely a way of cutting costs by getting around paying higher wages to a more qualified person. The introduction of nurse specialists has also changed the roles of nurses themselves, with an increase in auxiliary nurses to carry out the traditional hands-on tasks. But again this has caused concern for some people who believe that they are not experienced enough to work with ‘nurse’ as their job title. The only way to avoid this increasingly common situation for people who have concerns about this is to get a quote for private medical insurance to enable them to have access to hospitals outside the NHS.


Increasing the number of health visitors instead of nurse specialists has been suggested as a way of improving the health service. Health visitors may be taken for granted but they can actually be vital in picking up on early signs of child abuse and post-natal depression. In recent times, the number of health visitors has dropped, in fact figures have shown that it is at it’s lowest since 1994 meaning that many cases of these often hard to spot conditions may go unnoticed. A lot of women themselves do not even realise they have post-natal depression so they may wish to take out private medical insurance as a precautionary measure to ensure that symptoms are more likely to be picked up, either as part of a general well-being check up or with better access to health visitors and doctors than they would on the NHS.