Many thanks to everyone who has signed. We now have victory for our campaign - the government has said there must be a registered nurse on the board of every GP led commissioning consortia.

Nursing Times believes that nurses and midwives must be actively involved in the new commissioning consortia and represented on all boards.

Why?
- Nurses have previously been disenfranchised from commissioning services
- Nursing is the biggest single healthcare profession and it is vital for its voice to be heard
- Unlike other healthcare professionals, nurses see patients in all situations - in the community, patients' own homes and hospitals
- Nurses have the greatest amount of direct patient contact
- They share unique insight into the complex interplay of social, financial and environmental factors and their effects on health and well-being
- Nurses understand the impact on patients' families and carers

Please sign our petition today! Ensure that the new NHS will put patients - and those who know best how to look after them - at the heart of healthcare provision.

We the undersigned believe that as nurses play a crucial role in the provision of patient care, the profession must be represented in commissioning consortia.

We want those bodies that have begun issuing guidelines to consortia - the BMA, the RCGP, the National Association of Primary Care and the NHS Alliance - to state clearly that a nurse should be on the board, and we would ask for your support in this aim by issuing this advice to them.

Nurses don't just deserve to be on the board because of their number, but because of their unique experience in the NHS. They have a different focus from GPs, with a strong emphasis on patient care and quality of patient experience, and are the only profession who deliver holistic patient care, working to meet all the needs of individual patients rather than focusing on a narrowly defined aspect of those needs. Because nurses see patients in many different situations along the care pathway, and have a round the clock presence for many, they have insight to share that can significantly improve patient treatment outcomes.

With their heavy workload and limited consultation time GPs must focus largely on patients' medical needs or refer them on to specialist practitioners. They cannot be expected to step back and consider the impact of social, economic  and environmental factors, and there is a real danger that they will not have the perspective to ensure that service commissioning takes account of these. Ignoring nurses' contribution would seriously impact on patient safety and their quality of care, as well as the efficiency of the NHS. Therefore we urge you to involve nurses to ensure that those services being commissioned are designed to reflect the complex relationships between individuals' health and other wide ranging aspects of their lives.