Workforce Planning and Community Children’s Nurses: It’s all in the Advertisements

Abstract

This paper outlines a study exploring job advertisements for community children’s nurses (CCNs). A post-structural approach was taken to illuminate the development of community children’s nursing services (CCNS) and the profile of characteristics, skills and caseload within a workforce-planning context. An analysis of 100 advertisements looked at title, skills, caseload, qualifications and evolving roles. The analysis comprised aninitial quantitative descriptive account of data, followed by further analysis of the text using thematic analysis and coding. The skills identified were compared to those identified by Proctor et al. (1999). The most commonly occurring skills were interpersonal (35%), multi-professional team working (33%), clinical (28%), management (18%) and leadership (16%). The analysis was limited, but provides a unique insight into employers’ perceived needs in providing CCN services, evolving titles and roles and could inform practitioners, contribute to service evaluation, future service provision and workforce planning.