Responding to concerns.
Last year the government announced that from October 2001 all people over 18 living in a nursing home who were self-funding would have help with their payments. As readers of Nursing Older People will be aware, in July last year nursing homes were asked to identify patients who were eligible for free care, and lead nurses often had to be trained to determine what was the registered nurse's contribution to the care of individual patients. The contribution of the registered nurse having been determined, a level of funding within one of three bands was allocated on that basis.