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Showing results for tags 'Safe staffing'.
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Content ArticleThis report describes the lack of clear roles, responsibilities and accountability for workforce planning and supply in England. In reality, this means that the health and care workforce is not growing in line with increasing population need for health and care services and there are large numbers of vacant posts throughout the system. This impacts upon patient safety and outcomes, and leads to a challenging working environment for staff. The RCN make the case for this to be resolved through legislation, alongside additional investment in the nursing workforce and a national health and care workforce strategy for England. The RCN is clear, it is no longer the time to be discussing whether legislation is needed, instead, we should also be focussed on how we go about securing these necessary changes in law.
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My experience in a coroner’s court – a nurse perspective
Anonymous posted an article in Florence in the Machine
This is the story of a nurse's experience when attending a coroner's court and how the Trust supported them through this difficult time.- Posted
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Content ArticleChaired by Robert Francis QC, this Inquiry was set up to examine the commissioning, supervisory and regulatory organisations in relation to their monitoring role at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust between January 2005 and March 2009. The Inquiry looked at why the serious problems at the Trust were not identified and acted on sooner, to identify important lessons to be learnt for the future of patient care.
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Content ArticleA report from the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) and Queen’s Nursing Institute (QNI) calls for urgent investment in District Nursing, as new figures show the number of District Nurses working in the NHS has dropped by almost 43 percent in England alone in the last ten years.
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Content ArticleThis report describes the lack of clear roles, responsibilities and accountability for workforce planning and supply in England. In reality, this means that the health and care workforce is not growing in line with increasing population need for health and care services, and there are large numbers of vacant posts throughout the system. This impacts upon patient safety and outcomes, and leads to a challenging working environment for staff. To resolve this, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) make the case for this to be resolved through legislation, alongside additional investment in the nursing workforce and a national health and care workforce strategy for England.
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Content ArticleMany studies have investigated the presence of a ‘weekend effect’ in mortality following hospital admission, and these frequently use diagnostic codes from administrative data for information on co-morbidities for risk adjustment. However, it is possible that coding practice differs between week and weekend. This paper assess patients with a confirmed history of certain long-term health conditions and investigate how well these are recorded in subsequent week and weekend admissions.
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Content ArticleThis study assesses the association of increased bed occupancy with changes in the percentage of overnight patients discharged from hospital on a given day and their subsequent 30-day readmission rate. Longitudinal panel data methods are used to analyse secondary care records (n = 4,193,590) for 136 non-specialist Trusts between April 2014 and February 2016.
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Content ArticleThis is the Health Foundations third annual report analysing the staff profile and trends in the NHS workforce in England. It is intended to be read as an annual update, examining changes in the overall profile of NHS staffing in 2018.
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Content ArticleStaffing is the make-or-break issue for the NHS in England. This joint produced report sets out a series of policy actions that should be at the heart of the workforce implementation plan.
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Content ArticleNHS Improvement has designed this programme to help trusts develop evidence-based approaches to effective staffing decisions, taking into account all elements that contribute to safe, effective care and great patient experience.
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What it feels like working with unsafe staffing
Anonymous posted an article in Florence in the Machine
This blog has been written by a healthcare worker and demonstrates the reality of what it is like caring for patients and families while being chronically low on staff. They describe the impact this has on staff morale and the impact it has on patients, patients family members and the relationship between staff and patients.- Posted
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Content ArticleThis improvement resource set out by the National Quality Board is to help standardise safe, sustainable and productive staffing decisions in maternity services. This is an improvement resource to support staffing in maternity settings. It describes the principles for safe maternity staffing across the multiprofessional team to ensure women and their families receive joined-up care appropriate to their needs and wishes. The purpose of this resource is to help providers of NHS-commissioned services, boards and executive directors to support their head/director of midwifery and other lead professionals in implementing safe staffing for maternity settings. NHS provider boards are accountable for ensuring their organisation has the right culture, leadership and skills for safe, sustainable and productive staffing.
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Content ArticleBrighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust found a key challenge in tackling emergency department (ED) doctors' low levels of satisfaction, high rates of burnout and high turnover was because of the way shifts were organised. They found that while ED could be a highly pressurised environment that could contribute to these issues, another key challenge was the way shifts were organised and the lack of flexibility that had become a standard part of being an ED doctor.
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Content ArticleEast Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust's agency spend on healthcare support workers (HCSW) was high and rising. This caused not only financial pressures but concerns about care quality. The trust set itself the ambitious aim of eliminating agency spend on HCSWs entirely.
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Content ArticleThis case study shows how Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust sought to reduce their staff turnover by adopting a development opportunity created by Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust for newly qualified recruits – the Chief Nurse Junior Fellowship.
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Content ArticleProfessor Anne Marie Rafferty, Royal College of Nursing (RCN) President, has been involved in two decades of vital nursing workforce research. She explains in this interview for the RCN how the evidence could help us achieve safe staffing.
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Content ArticleAn adverse clinical event, patient safety incident or medical error can have a far-reaching impact not only for the patient and their families, the 'first victims', but also the healthcare professionals involved. These are sometimes referred to as ‘second victims’. Often there are few opportunities for second victim healthcare professionals to discuss the details of incidents or events and share how this has affected them personally. The East Midlands Patient Safety Collaborative (EMPSC) funded the University of Leicester as part of their National Safety Culture workstream to develop a Second Victim Support Unit within the Children’s Hospital at University Hospitals Leicester to test whether models of support established in the US could be successfully transferred to UK health settings.
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Content ArticleThis report states that patient and public engagement has been on the NHS agenda for many years, but the impact has been disappointing. There have been a great many public consultations, surveys, and one-off initiatives, but it argues that the service is still not sufficiently patient-centred. In particular, it looks at a lack of focus on engaging patients in their own clinical care, despite strong evidence that this could make a real difference to health outcomes. This paper argues that a more strategic approach is required to create the necessary shift in beliefs, attitudes and behaviours.
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Content ArticleThis is a summary of the Care Quality Commission (CQC) report into social care in the UK. This report is written to target all audiences.
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Content ArticleBetween 2005 and 2008 conditions of appalling care were able to flourish in the main hospital serving the people of Stafford and its surrounding area. During this period this hospital was managed by a Board which succeeded in leading its Trust (the Mid Staffordshire General Hospital NHS Trust) to foundation trust (FT) status. The Board was one which had largely replaced its predecessor because of concerns about the then NHS Trust’s performance. In preparation for its application for FT status, the Trust had been scrutinised by the local Strategic Health Authority (SHA) and the Department of Health (DH). Local scrutiny committees and public involvement groups detected no systemic failings. In the end, the truth was uncovered in part by attention being paid to the true implications of its mortality rates, but mainly because of the persistent complaints made by a very determined group of patients and those close to them. This group wanted to know why they and their loved ones had been failed so badly. The report was laid before Parliament in response to a legislative requirement.
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Content ArticleThe Safer Nursing Care Tool has been developed by the Shelford Group to help NHS hospital staff measure patient acuity and/or dependency to inform evidence-based decision making on staffing and workforce. The tool, when allied to Nurse Sensitive Indicators (NSIs), offers nurses a reliable method against which to deliver evidence-based workforce plans to support existing services or to develop new services. The Shelford Group is an organisation comprising Chief Executives of 10 of the leading NHS multi-specialty academic healthcare organisations in England. The Chief Nurses of each of these NHS Trusts belong to a subgroup of the organisation and they meet every two months to share best-practice, benchmark and work towards improving standards in nursing.
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Safer staffing - guidance from NHS Improvement
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Safe staffing levels
NHS Improvement provide general guidance and a starting point towards delivering effective safer staffing. -
Content ArticleMind the Gap 2021 explores what training looked like for the maternity services workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how this relates to the factors that contribute to the avoidable harm and deaths of mothers, birthing people, and their babies. It is an ongoing piece of research by the charity Baby Lifeline. The report directly surveys recommendations from reports investigating avoidable harm and takes into account wider events affecting maternity care. Training is a central recommendation for improving safety in maternity services. Gaps which already existed in training due to chronic underfunding and staff shortages have become worse, and this report will give recommendations to improve training nationally and locally at a critical time for maternity.
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Content ArticleIn response to the pandemic earlier this year, the priority became freeing up as much bed and staffing capacity as possible within hospitals in anticipation of the incoming tide of COVID-19 patients. One way of doing this was postponing all non-urgent elective operations for a period of at least three months. It was estimated that this would free up 12,000-15,000 hospital beds in England alone. This approach was successful in the short-term, helping the NHS to meet the immediate demand created by the pandemic. However, it has produced a longer-term challenge as we transition back to ‘normal’ with a large backlog of cases. Decisions about how these are prioritised will have significant implications for the health and wellbeing of patients. In this blog, Patient Safety Learning look at the patient safety implications and highlight where we need to focus on to avoid patient harm. Read the full blog on the Patient Safety Learning website.
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Content ArticleThe Safer Nursing Care Tool is a system designed to guide decisions about nurse staffing requirements on hospital wards, in particular the number of nurses to employ (establishment). It is widely used in English hospitals but there is a lack of evidence about how effective and cost-effective nurse staffing tools are at providing the staffing levels needed for safe and quality patient care. The objective of this study, published in Health Services and Delivery Research, was to determine whether or not the Safer Nursing Care Tool corresponds to professional judgement, to assess a range of options for using the Safer Nursing Care Tool and to model the costs and consequences of various ward staffing policies based on Safer Nursing Care Tool acuity/dependency measure. Authors conclude that employing more permanent staff than recommended by the Safer Nursing Care Tool guidelines, meeting demand most days, could be cost-effective. Apparent cost savings from ‘flexible (low)’ establishments are achieved largely by below-adequate staffing. Cost savings are eroded under the conditions of high temporary staff availability that are required to make such policies function.
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