Search the hub
Showing results for tags 'Staff support'.
Found 863 results
-
Content ArticleDespite the constant pressures and chronic shortages, the number of nurses leaving the NHS had flatlined over recent years. Now our analysis of new data shows there has been a large increase in nurses leaving the NHS, and that this trend is being driven by younger workers. The last year's data (June 2021 - June 2022) saw a 25% increase in the number of NHS nurses leaving their role, with an additional 7,000 leaving compared to the previous year. The largest increase in numbers leaving was seen among the younger nurses, two thirds of leavers were under 45 years of age. In this article, Jonathon Holmes explores why there is a sudden increase in vacancies.
-
Content ArticleDevelop your understanding of your own health and wellbeing to better lead and support your colleagues, and organisation in this King's Fund online course delivered over 3 weeks.
-
News ArticleAn ambulance service rated ‘inadequate’ by the Care Quality Commission has set out a wide-ranging improvement plan, including ‘civility training’ for senior leaders and ensuring board members hear a mix of ‘positive and negative’ stories from patients and staff. South Central Ambulance Service has been moved into the equivalent of “special measures” by NHS England, in the wake of the Care Quality Commission report in August which criticised “extreme positivity” at the highest levels of the organisation. This means 3 out of only 10 dedicated ambulance service trusts in England are now in segment four of NHSE’s system oversight framework, the successor to special measures. The other ambulance services in segment four are East of England and South East Coast. In a damning inspection report published in August, the care watchdog said that leaders were “out of touch” and staff had faced a “dismissive attitude” when they tried to raise concerns. One staff member told inspectors: “When sexual harassment is reported it seems to be brushed under the carpet and the person is given a second chance. Because of this, a lot of staff feel unsafe, unsupported and vulnerable when coming to work.” An improvement plan summary published at the start of last month included a large number of priorites and actions, including to “ensure [a] mix of positive and negative patient/staff stories are presented to [trust] board meetings” – an apparent attempt to address CQC concerns that its positive outlook could feel “dismissive of the reality to frontline staff”. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 11 October 2022
-
News Article
Number of NHSE whistleblowers tripled in 2021-22
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
The number of concerns reported by NHS England staff through the freedom to speak up process almost tripled last year, the organisation’s latest board papers have revealed. There were 152 cases received by the internal freedom to speak up guardians in 2021-22 compared to 56 in 2020-21. This year 54 cases were received in quarter three alone. The most common concerns are related to allegations of bullying and harassment. These accounted for nearly 40% of the total. People and team management concerns accounted for a third of FTSU cases. Within the latter, there were sub-themes of breakdown in relationships, failure to offer role models and sanctioning or ignoring poor culture. This week’s report also set out the NHSE FTSU guardian’s next steps. These include appointing a lead guardian, finalising a strategy and continuing to engage with Health Education England and NHS Digital staff as they are brought into NHSE next year. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 7 October 2022 -
Content ArticleIn this blog, Ted Baker, Former Chief Inspector of Hospitals at the Care Quality Commission, suggests that a false view that health services are intrinsically safe leads to defensive responses to safety concerns and perpetuates a culture of blame. He argues that the mismatch between safety as described and the reality of safety in practice prevents healthcare professionals being able to speak up about safety concerns. By taking an alternative approach that accepts the risk inherent in healthcare and the fallibility of individuals, he believes we can build organisations and systems that really learn from safety events. In order to do this, we need staff to feel able and supported to speak up, something that can be achieved through widespread understanding of safety society and building a supportive culture. Ted argues that this open culture is still lacking within many services.
-
Event
The Trauma of Trauma
Patient Safety Learning posted an event in Community Calendar
Treating trauma can be traumatic. The UK now has over 30 major trauma centres which treat more than 40,000 patients with traumatic injuries each year. For people under the age of 40, trauma remains a leading cause of death, and trauma survivors often experience life-changing injury and long-term disability. This study day examines the impact of various traumatic injuries on patients and the teams who care for them. Exploring burns, orthopaedic and battlefield trauma, as well as how to manage mass casualty events, you’ll learn about a wide range of trauma care scenarios. The speakers will outline how battlefield experience can be adapted for frontline work in within the NHS, with a key focus on the mental, physical and practical skills required to manage trauma to achieve the best outcomes for both patient and practitioner. The goal is to provide you with theory and practical skills to help you manage the mental and physical aspects of trauma in different settings. The sessions will also support you with understanding how skills learnt in one area can be transferred to another. Topics include: Treatment of acute burn injuries. The role of the Orthopaedic Trauma Coordinator. Introduction to AO Trauma Principles. Mass Casualty Events and the Citizen Aid App – with practical demo. Trauma and resilience in the armed forces: A Captain’s perspective. Trauma management on the battlefield. Register -
News ArticleNurses will start voting on Thursday on whether to strike over pay amid warnings that record numbers are leaving the profession. Around 300,000 members of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) are being asked if they want to mount a campaign of industrial action in the union’s first UK-wide ballot. The RCN said new analysis by London Economics to coincide with the ballot launch showed that pay for nurses has declined at twice the rate of the private sector in the last decade. It is the first time in its 106-year history that the RCN has balloted members across the UK on strike action and it is urging them to vote in favour. RCN general secretary Pat Cullen said in a message to those being balloted: “This is a once-in-a-generation chance to improve your pay and combat the staff shortages that put patients at risk. “Governments have repeatedly neglected the NHS and the value of nursing. We can change this if together we say ‘enough is enough’. “Record numbers are feeling no alternative but to quit and patients pay a heavy price. We are doing this for them too." Read full story Source: The Independent, 6 October 2022
-
Content ArticleThis framework from NHS England supports nurses, midwives and care staff in ensuring care remains at a high standard, as well as demonstrating the contribution to the Long Covid response. It aims to give the opportunity to embrace collective leadership in supporting people and communities served and showcase good practice as it emerges across England.
-
Content ArticleMany nurses also act as family caregivers, and this study in the journal Nursing Outlook aimed to examine the impact of family caregiving on nurses, their colleagues and the organisations they work for. Nurse caregivers and healthcare organisation leaders completed two surveys about views on family caregiving. The authors found that healthcare leaders perceived family caregiving to have a larger impact on the nurses’ health and work performance than nurses themselves. Family caregiving was also identified as a potential contributor to burnout, and the authors highlight that lack of workplace support for family caregiving may influence nurses decisions about leaving or reducing their role.
-
Content Article
Three years since we launched the hub, our award-winning platform to share learning for patient safety, we have seen it grow in members, content and impact. To date, the hub has received over 565,000 visits and had over 1 million page views. It now has over 3,400 members from 80 countries working in over 1,000 different organisations, and offers 7,500 knowledge resources, viewed by people from 221 countries. We continue to highlight serious patient safety issues, celebrate patient safety achievements, provide ‘how to’ resources on good practice and offer a safe space for staff and patients to share their experiences and discuss challenges. In this blog, we would like to celebrate just some of the work we are especially proud of and highlight where we’ve been making the case for change and the many ways the hub is making an impact. -
News Article
‘Know, Check, Ask’ before you take medication urges Northern Ireland's Minister
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
Both patients and healthcare staff have a central role to play in ensuring the safe use of medicines, Health Minister Robin Swann has said. Minister for Health Robin Swann was speaking at an event to mark the roll out of the ‘Know, Check, Ask’ Campaign across all healthcare sectors in Northern Ireland. The aim of the campaign is to increase awareness and understanding about the importance of using medicine safely. The call for action of the campaign is for: Patients to Know Check Ask – Before you take it: KNOW your medicines and keep an up-to-date list. CHECK that you are using your medicines in the right way. ASK your healthcare professional if you’re not sure. Health Care staff to Know Check Ask – Before you give it: KNOW your medications. CHECK you have the right: patient, medicine, route, dose and time. ASK your patient if they understand and ask your colleagues when you are unsure. Minister Swann added “I want to encourage and help patients to be more curious about their medication, know what medication they are using, how to use it safely and feel able to ask their health care professionals questions about their medicines. Patients should also feel able and confident to report problems with their medication early and so help reduce avoidable harm.” Read full story Source: Department of Health, 30 September 2022 -
Content ArticleTalking General Practice speaks to Dr Helen Garr, medical director of NHS Practitioner Health, the NHS service that looks after doctors and dentists - and also other NHS staff - who are experiencing mental ill health. In this conversation, Helen talk about the impact that pressures on the NHS are having on doctors’ wellbeing and how this is affecting GPs in particular. Helen also explains what doctors and other NHS staff can do if they are suffering from burnout, how to prevent burnout, what people can do if they are worried about a colleague and how NHS Practitioner Health supports doctors who seek help from the service. She also outlines how she thinks the NHS could change to help ensure better mental health for doctors and other staff.
-
News Article
Record number of nurses quitting the NHS
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
Record numbers of nurses are quitting the NHS in England, figures show. More than 40,000 have walked away from the NHS in the past year - one in nine of the workforce, an analysis by the Nuffield Trust think tank for the BBC revealed. It said many of these were often highly skilled and knowledgeable nurses with years more of work left to give. And the high number of leavers is nearly cancelling out the rise in new joiners that has been seen. There were just 4,000 more joiners than leavers in the year to the end of June. But a Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said progress was being made and the government was already halfway to meeting its target to increase the numbers of nurses working in the NHS in England during this Parliament by 50,000. He said a workforce strategy would be published soon, setting out how the NHS will continue to recruit and retain nurses in the coming years. Read full story Source: BBC News, 30 September 2022 -
Content ArticleNursing is the single largest profession in the NHS, but it suffers from substantial staffing shortages. This analysis from Billy Palmer and Lucina Rolewicz for the Nuffield Trust reflects on the rate at which the health service is losing nurses, and considers the reasons why.
-
News Article
Racism against nurses: nurse speaks out following hours of abuse
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
A nurse has told how she almost quit her job this month after a patient shouted out racist slurs for hours on a recent night shift. Beverly Simpson, who works as a nurse in a care home in Derry, Northern Ireland, said she was left angry and broken after a patient repeatedly used derogatory racist language and told her ‘to go back to her own country’. Ms Simpson reported the incident on 4 September to managers, who are now investigating. In the meantime, she has called on all employers and peers to do more to protect staff from racism that she says she encounters every week. "I have been a nurse for almost 30 years, but that night made me feel like I wanted to quit,’ she told Nursing Standard. ‘I was just worn down with it all. I’m human, I am hurt, but I still have to go back and treat this patient, be professional and hold my head up high." "It’s all very well a black nurse standing up and saying it is wrong, but we need allies. There needs to be training and protocols on what to do in these situations. Instead, there is a blanket of silence." Read full story Source: Nursing Standard, 28 September 2022 -
Community Post
Can the NHS learn from healthcare systems overseas?
Steve Turner posted a topic in Organisational
- (and 24 more)
Is it time to change the way England's healthcare system is funded? Is the English system in need of radical structural change at the top? I've been prompted to think about this by the article about the German public health system on the BBC website: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-62986347.amp There are no quick fixes, however we all need to look at this closely. I believe that really 'modernising' / 'transforming' our health & #socialcare systems could 'save the #NHS'. Both for #patients through improved safety, efficiency & accountability, and by making the #NHS an attractive place to work again, providing the NHS Constitution for England is at the heart of changes and is kept up to date. In my experience, having worked in healthcare for the private sector and the NHS, and lived and worked in other countries, we need to open our eyes. At present it could be argued that we have the worst of both worlds in England. A partially privatised health system and a fully privatised social care system. All strung together by poor commissioning and artificial and toxic barriers, such as the need for continuing care assessments. In my view a change, for example to a German-style system, could improve patient safety through empowering the great managers and leaders we have in the NHS. These key people are held back by the current hierarchical crony-ridden system, and we are at risk of losing them. In England we have a system which all too often punishes those who speak out for patients and hides failings behind a web of denial, obfuscation and secrecy, and in doing this fails to learn. Vast swathes of unnecessary bureaucracy and duplication could be eliminated, gaps more easily identified, and greater focus given to deeply involving patients in the delivery of their own care. This is a contentious subject as people have such reverence for the NHS. I respect the values of the NHS and want to keep them; to do this effectively we need much more open discussion on how it is organised and funded. What are people's views? -
Content ArticleIn this article in the Patient Safety Journal, Mayher Profita, a third-year surgical resident in Pennsylvania, describers her residency and the burnout she experienced. "The burnout was making us care less about our patients and the care they received and more about whether we made the right career choice."
-
Content ArticleRepeated culture of safety surveys of the nursing staff at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s main campus demonstrated lagging scores in the domain of nonpunitive responses to error. The hospital had tried for many years to address the problem using a variety of strategies, including small group training sessions on just culture for staff and leaders, but had met with limited success. Finally, in 2015, it committed to trying something genuinely different—even perhaps disruptive—that might actually shift the stagnant metrics. Their novel, multifaceted programme, implemented over a two-year period, yielded a 13% increase in staff rating scores that the hospital has been able to sustain over the subsequent two-year period. The design and rollout of our program was neither simple nor smooth, but valuable lessons were learned about realistic, operational implementation of principles of psychological safety in a large and complex clinical organisation. In this paper, Neiswender et al. describe the programme and the lessons learned in the journey from idea inception to post-implementation.
-
Content ArticleFrom April 2023 the new Health Services Safety Investigations Body will require doctors to be candid about errors that have led to patient harm. But can medics trust that material given in this “safe space” won’t be used against them?
-
Content ArticleIn this blog, Jeremy Hunt MP, Founder of Patient Safety Watch, outlines six priorities for the new Health Secretary, Therese Coffey MP. He argues that these patient safety priorities will help reduce elective and emergency pressures and save money.
-
Content Article
In this blog for the hub, Julia Wood explains why Joy in Work is so important, how you can implement it into your team ensuring you and your colleagues are happier at work, and why a happier team will improve patient care. -
News Article
Staff warned of ‘harrowing’ care standards review
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
Trust staff have been warned that an independent investigation into maternity services will be ‘a harrowing read’ with a ‘profound and significant impact’. The report into services at East Kent Hospitals University Foundation Trust between 2009 and 2020 had been expected to be published on Wednesday 21 September. However, this morning families involved in the investigation received an email saying publication would be postponed to an unknown date in October.. Next Wednesday, when the report was expected to be released and a statement made to Parliament, has been set aside for all MPs to take an oath of allegiance to King Charles III. An email sent to staff at East Kent last week and seen by HSJ said publication would place “significant focus on the trust and all of our services”, and that the trust would make support available to staff as well as former, current and potential patients. The trust will not see the report before publication. The investigation – led by Dr Bill Kirkup, who also led the Morecambe Bay maternity investigation – was prompted by the death of week-old Harry Richford after a traumatic birth at the trust’s Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, Hospital in Thanet in 2017. Around 200 families are thought to have contacted the investigation team with concerns around maternity care. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 15 September 2022 -
News Article
Burnout in doctors doubles chances of patient safety problems, study finds
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
Doctors suffering from burnout are far more likely to be involved in incidents where patients’ safety is compromised, a global study has found. Burned-out medics are also much more likely to consider quitting, regret choosing medicine as their career, be dissatisfied with their job and receive low satisfaction ratings from patients. The findings, published in the BMJ, have raised fresh concern over the welfare and pressures on doctors in the NHS, given the extensive evidence that many are experiencing stress and exhaustion due to overwork. A joint team of British and Greek researchers analysed 170 previous observational studies of the links between burnout among doctors, their career engagement and quality of patient care. Those papers were based on the views and experience of 239,246 doctors in countries including the US, UK and others in Africa, Asia and elsewhere globally. They found that burned-out medics were twice as likely as their peers to have been involved in patient safety incidents, to show low levels of professionalism and to have been rated poorly by patients for the quality of the care they have provided. Doctors aged 20 to 30 and those working in A&E or intensive care were most likely to have burnout. It was defined as comprising emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation – a “negative, callous” detachment from their job – and a sense of reduced personal accomplishment. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 14 September 2022 -
Content Article
Why everyone needs a coach - Atul Gawande (TED2017)
Patient Safety Learning posted an article in Motivating staff
How do we improve in the face of complexity? Atul Gawande has studied this question with a surgeon's precision. He shares what he's found to be the key: having a good coach to provide a more accurate picture of our reality, to instill positive habits of thinking, and to break our actions down and then help us build them back up again. "It's not how good you are now; it's how good you're going to be that really matters," Gawande says. -
News Article
Largest private-sector nurses strike in U.S. history begins in Minnesota
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
About 15,000 nurses in Minnesota walked off the job Monday to protest understaffing and overwork — marking the largest strike of private-sector nurses in U.S. history. Slated to last three days, the strike spotlights nationwide nursing shortages exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic that often result in patients not receiving adequate care. Minnesota nurses charge that some units go without a lead nurse on duty and that nurses fresh out of school are delegated assignments typically held by more experienced nurses, across some 16 hospitals where strikes are expected. The nurses are demanding a role in staffing plans, changes to shift scheduling practices and higher wages. “I can’t give my patients the care they deserve,” said Chris Rubesch, the vice president of the Minnesota Nurses Association and a nurse at Essentia Health in Duluth. “Call lights go unanswered. Patients should only be waiting for a few seconds or minutes if they’ve soiled themselves or their oxygen came unplugged or they need to go to the bathroom, but that can take 10 minutes or more. Those are things that can’t wait.” Read full story (paywalled) Source: Washington Post, 12 September 2022
