Employers' duty of care to district nursing team members: health and safety concerns with lone domiciliary visits

Abstract

District nurses and their teams often work in isolation during domiciliary visits. As employers, providers of district nursing services have responsibility to ensure that appropriate policies and procedures are in place to keep district nursing teams safe. If the employer fails to do everything that was reasonable in the circumstances to keep the employee safe, the employer can be deemed to have breached their duty of care. Employees also have responsibility for their own health and wellbeing at work, and they are entitled by law to refuse to undertake work that is not safe, without fear of disciplinary action. Staff training in risk management, personal safety, handling aggressive behaviour, using safety devices such as mobile phone trackers, incident reporting and debriefing are essential for district nurses and their teams, as they face a steeply increased demand for their services and a severely compromised skill mix within their teams.