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Showing results for tags 'Safe staffing'.
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News Article
Mental health trust failed to heed safety warnings, campaigners say
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
A mental health trust linked to thousands of unexpected patient deaths repeatedly failed to act on coroners' safety warnings, campaigners say. BBC News has been given exclusive access to new evidence from coroners' reports gathered by a campaign group. It wants a criminal investigation into why so many patients died at Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust - and has sent police the evidence. Campaigners, including patients and bereaved families, claim it is failing to make vital safety improvements despite promising to do so. Last summer, a report found more than 8,000 mental-health patients had died unexpectedly in Norfolk and Suffolk between 2019 and 2022. This is defined as the death of a patient who has not been identified as critically ill or whose death is not expected by the clinical team. The new evidence, based on 38 coroners' prevention of future death (PFD) reports since 2013, suggests there were repeated warnings more patients could die unless safety issues were addressed, including: dangerously poor record-keeping and communication family concerns being ignored unsafe levels of staffing at the trust. And campaigners say the trust's failure to improve safety has led to more deaths. Read full story Source: BBC News, 12 March 2024- Posted
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- Mental health
- Patient death
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Content ArticleThis month marks two years of the hub's Patient Safety Spotlight interview series. Patient Safety Learning's Content and Engagement Manager Lotty Tizzard reflects on the value of sharing personal insights and identifies the key patient safety themes that interviewees have highlighted over the past two years.
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- Collaboration
- Patient engagement
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Content ArticleIn this interview, Professor Martin Marshall, former GP and Chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners, shares his concerns for the future of general practice in the UK. He outlines the danger that more of the workforce will turn to private practice due to current pressures facing NHS GPs.
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- GP
- Private sector
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Content ArticleThe adrenal glands are found in the fatty tissue at the back of the abdomen above each kidney, and produce steroid and adrenaline hormones. Surgery on tumours of the adrenal gland is uncommon compared with surgery for other tumours such as those of the breast, bowel, kidney and lung. Research has shown that the more adrenal operations a surgeon undertakes per year, the better the overall outcomes for patients undergoing that type of surgery. In this study, the outcomes from adrenal operations recorded over 18 years in the national adrenal surgical registry were analysed. The results confirmed previous findings showing that postoperative complications and length of hospital stay were reduced for patients operated by surgeons who did more adrenal operations per year. Operations done by keyhole surgery had better outcomes. Operations done either in older patients, or for the rare adrenal cancer tumours had worse outcomes, as did operations in which both adrenal glands were removed. The authors recommended that all surgeons performing adrenal surgery should monitor the outcomes of their operations, ideally in a national registry, and discuss these with patients before surgery; and undertake a minimum of six adrenal operations per year, but a minimum of 12 per year if doing surgery for adrenal cancer or surgery to remove both adrenal glands.
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- Surgery - General
- Medicine - Diabetes and Endocrinology
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Content ArticleThe press has all been full of headlines about staffing levels in the NHS, but this is probably a problem across healthcare around the country. What this does is provide the perfect patient safety quandary, how do we keep all the areas safe. This often results in the redeployment of nursing staff to different areas, but does this provide the required levels of safety. It appears that having several areas in an “amber” staffing level is preferable than one red area. It is simple logic, but does this create an unrealistic expectation on staff that means the safety is better but only at a barely satisfactory level? Do we think that any of these decisions influences the efficiency of a ward? Is the ward safe and effective? In this blog, Chris Elston explores these issues and uses a Safety Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety (SEIPS) to show some of the lesser appreciated risks to redeploying staff and consider some ways to reduce the risks.
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- Redeployment
- Staff factors
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Content Article
APIC staffing calculator
Patient-Safety-Learning posted an article in Safe staffing levels
This staffing calculator has been developed by the US Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC). The tool is in beta version and uses input from individual healthcare facilities to provide recommendations to assist with infection prevention staffing decisions. There are three separate calculators: Acute care hospital calculator Long-term care calculator Ambulatory clinic calculator As the tool is currently in development, the data collected from participating organisations will be used to update the calculators and provide the most accurate staffing recommendations.- Posted
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- Safe staffing
- Medicine - Acute internal
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Content ArticleIn the USA, Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) work-hour restrictions (WHRs) are intended to improve patient safety by reducing resident doctor fatigue. However, compliance with ACGME WHRs is not universal. This study aimed to identify factors that influence resident doctors' decisions to take a post-call day (PCD) off in line with ACGME WHRs. The authors concluded that as most important influencer of residents’ decisions to take a PCD off was related to feedback from their supervisors, compliance with WHRs can be improved by focusing on the residency program’s safety culture.
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- Safe staffing
- Fatigue / exhaustion
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Content ArticleThe USA National Nurses United is proposing for minimum, mandated, nurse-to-patient staffing ratios to protect patients’ right to nursing care. Every patient deserves a single standard of high-quality care. The ratios, coupled with nurses’ powerful voice of advocacy secured in collective bargaining, protect patients from complications that arise from missed care such as medical errors, health care disparities, infections, and so much more.
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- Safe staffing
- Workforce management
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News Article
Midwife quit over 'unsafe care' and staffing
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
A former midwife has told the BBC she quit because she could not live with herself if she provided poor care. Hannah Williams says staff shortages meant she kept patients safe, but sometimes only "by the skin of her teeth". BBC Verify analysis shows that the number of full-time equivalent midwife posts in England has gone up by 7% in the last decade. In comparison, the overall NHS workforce has increased by 34%. The country has a shortage of about 2,500 midwives, and maternity units are struggling with safety concerns. BBC research has also found that some trusts have more than one in five midwife jobs unfilled. The Royal College of Midwives says staffing is the "most important issue" and the gap needs to close. Read full story Source: BBC News, 9 January 2024- Posted
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- Midwife
- Additional staff required
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Content ArticleThe Royal College of Nursing (RCN) held its first ever safe staffing summit, bringing together global nursing workforce experts with senior nurses across the UK to agree a vision for the future and how to fight for it. When there are too few nursing staff, they can be stretched dangerously thin. With tens of thousands of vacant nurse posts across the UK right now, this happens too often. The summit heard compelling evidence about the impact of safe nurse-to-patient ratios, set in law in other countries, where there are limits on the number of patients one nurse can safely care for. Nicola Ranger, RCN's Chief Nurse, reflects on the outcome of the RCN’s first ever safe staffing summit.
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- Nurse
- Staff support
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Content ArticleThis narrative review in the journal Anaesthesia reviews the background to overlapping surgery, an approach in which a single senior surgeon operates across two parallel operating theatres. Anaesthesia is induced and surgery commenced by junior surgeons in the second operating theatre while the lead surgeon completes the operation in the first. The authors assessed whether there is any theoretical basis to expect increased productivity in terms of number of operations completed. A review of observational studies found that while there is a perception of increased surgical output for one surgeon, there is no evidence of increased productivity compared with two surgeons working in parallel. There is potential for overlapping surgery to have some positive impact in situations where turnover times between cases are long, operations are short and where ‘critical portions’ of surgery constitute about half of the total operation time. However, any advantages must be balanced against safety, ethical and training concerns.
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- Safe staffing
- Productivity
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Event
IHI Forum
Sam posted an event in Community Calendar
untilThe IHI Forum is a four-day conference that has been the home of quality improvement in health care for more than 30 years. Dedicated improvement professionals from across the globe will be convening to tackle health care's most pressing challenges: improvement capability, patient and workforce safety, equity, climate change, artificial intelligence, and more. Register- Posted
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- Quality improvement
- Safe staffing
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Content ArticleIn this opinion piece for the BMJ, Partha Kar looks at the current debate surrounding the role of medical associate professionals (MAPs) in the NHS. He highlights the concerns raised by many that MAPs are “doctors on the cheap” and outlines the reasons for friction between junior doctors and MAPs, which include the issues of pay, training and regulation. He also outlines issues facing locally employed doctors (LEDs), international medical graduates (IMGs) and specialist, associate specialists (SASs) including lack of access to training, supervision and career progression. He makes five suggestions to improve the situation and calls for a pause to consider how these different roles can interact and work together, for the good of both staff and the health service.
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- Doctor
- Workforce management
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Content ArticleThis is part of our series of Patient Safety Spotlight interviews, where we talk to people working for patient safety about their role and what motivates them. Jenny talks about the challenge of keeping up with and prioritising new guidance and the need to streamline recommendations to ensure they are implemented efficiently. She also discusses the importance of getting the basics, like staffing levels, right and how sea swimming has influenced how she sees patient safety.
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- Clinical governance
- Quality improvement
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Content ArticleThis report by the Nuffield Trust looks at workforce training issues in England, arguing that the domestic training pipeline for clinical careers has been unfit for purpose for many years. It presents research that highlights leaks across the training pathway, from students dropping out of university, to graduates pursuing careers outside the profession they trained in and outside public services. Alongside high numbers of doctors, nurses and other clinicians leaving the NHS early in their careers, this is contributing to publicly funded health and social care services being understaffed and under strain. It is also failing to deliver value for money for the huge taxpayer investment in education and training.
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- Workforce management
- Safe staffing
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Content ArticleThe Community Hospitals Association (CHA) has designed a suite of resource packs as a way of sharing some of the learning in an accessible way. This resource pack focuses on the topic of safer staffing in community hospitals. This resource pack has been compiled because of requests from members of the CHA and the Special Interest Group in Q
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Content ArticleThe nurse-to-patient ratio represents the number of patients a registered nurse cares for during a shift. Most hospitals have guidelines to ensure safe staffing ratios, but staffing shortages have led to heavier nursing workloads. This article outlines which US states have laws and regulations in place for safe staffing ratios.
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Content Article
A strategy for the care workforce (TUC, August 2023)
Patient-Safety-Learning posted an article in Social care
The Trade Unions Congress (TUC) is proposing a new care workforce strategy for England, developed with trade unions and informed by the voice and experiences of care workers. This strategy document sets out the critical building blocks to ensure care workers are valued and supported, as a key means of addressing the current staffing crisis and improving access to and quality of social and childcare services.- Posted
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- Social care
- Workforce management
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News Article
NHS 'to employ half of public sector by 2026'
Patient-Safety-Learning posted a news article in News
The NHS workforce plan will cost £50 billion and result in the health service employing half the public sector by the 2030s, analysis concludes today. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, has in effect “stolen more than a decade’s worth of budgets” from his successors by setting out plans to hire almost a million extra NHS staff without a clear way to pay for them, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) says. Hunt has been urged to use his autumn statement to start setting out whether tax rises, borrowing or cuts elsewhere will be used to fund the “massive spending commitment”. Read full story (paywalled) Source: The Times, 30 August 2023 -
Content ArticleThis study in Intensive and Critical Care Nursing examined the association between safety attitudes, quality of care, missed care, nurse staffing levels and the rate of healthcare-associated infection (HAI) in adult intensive care units (ICUs). The authors concluded that positive safety culture and better nurse staffing levels can lower the rates of HAIs in ICUs. Improvements to nurse staffing will reduce nursing workloads, which may reduce missed care, increase job satisfaction, and, ultimately, reduce HAIs.
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- Healthcare associated infection
- Infection control
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News Article
NHS whistleblowers warn of 'unsafe' A&E staff shortages
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
A group of senior doctors has accused NHS Grampian of ignoring their safety concerns about emergency departments. They told BBC Scotland News they were speaking out because they feel they cannot deliver a safe level of care. The medics said staff shortages meant Grampian's two A&Es have no senior registrars on shift to make key decisions about patients for the majority of weekend night shifts. Documents seen by the BBC News show medics have been raising concerns since 2021, both with NHS Grampian and the Scottish government, and in July this year submitted a formal whistleblowing complaint about the situation. One doctor said: "The staff are in an impossible situation. "We are witnessing ongoing harm with unacceptable delays to the assessment and treatment of patients. "There have been avoidable deaths and at other times there are too long delays getting to patients who may be suffering from a serious condition like stroke or sepsis." Read full story Source: BBC News, 23 August 2023- Posted
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- Safe staffing
- Additional staff required
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Content ArticleGeorgia Stevenson discusses NHS England’s Long Term Workforce Plan, evaluating its potential to alleviate staffing shortages, enhance training routes, and ultimately improve care quality in maternity and neonatal services.
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- Maternity
- Safe staffing
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News Article
Jeremy Hunt ‘ignored’ NHS staff shortages while health secretary
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
Jeremy Hunt has been accused of ignoring serious NHS staff shortages for years and driving medics out of the profession while health secretary after he intervened this weekend to warn of a workforce crisis. Promoting his new book, 'Zero: Eliminating Unnecessary Deaths in a Post-Pandemic NHS', Hunt said tackling the “chronic failure of workforce planning” was the most important task in relieving pressure on frontline services. Now the chair of the health and social care committee, he said the situation was “very, very serious”, with doctors and nurses “run ragged by the intensity of work”. But his comments drew sharp criticism from healthcare staff, who said Hunt – the longest-serving health secretary in the 74-year history of the NHS – failed to take sufficient action to boost recruitment while in the top job between 2012 and 2018. Instead, critics said, his tenure saw health workers quit the NHS in droves for jobs abroad or new careers outside medicine. There are now 100,000 vacancies in the NHS, and the waiting list for treatment has soared to 6.4 million. “There’s an avalanche of pressure bearing down on the NHS. But for years Jeremy Hunt and other ministers ignored the staffing crisis,” said Sara Gorton, the head of health at Unison, the UK’s largest health union. “The pandemic has amplified the consequences of that failure. Experienced employees are leaving at faster rates than new ones can be recruited.” “Hunt has recently been an articulate analyst of current issues, particularly workforce shortages, but these haven’t come out of the blue,” said Dr Colin Hutchinson, the chair of Doctors for the NHS. “At the time he could have made the greatest impact, his response was muted. We have to ask: was the service people were receiving from the NHS better, or worse, at the end of his time in office? At the time when it most mattered, he was found wanting.” Read full story Source: The Guardian, 15 May 2022- Posted
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- Staff factors
- Safe staffing
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News Article
US faces deficit of 450,000 nurses by 2025
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
The United States could see a deficit of 200,000 to 450,000 registered nurses available for direct patient care by 2025, a 10 to 20% gap that places great demand on the nurse graduate pipeline over the next three years. The new estimates and analysis come from a McKinsey report published this week. The shortfall range of 200,000 to 450,000 holds if there are no changes in current care delivery models. The consulting firm estimates that for every 1% of nurses who leave direct patient care, the shortage worsens by about 30,000 nurses. To make up for the 10 to 20%, the United States would need to more than double the number of new graduates entering and staying in the nursing workforce every year for the next three years straight. For this to occur, the number of nurse educators would also need to increase. "Even if there was a huge increase in high school or college students seeking nursing careers, they would likely run into a block: There are not enough spots in nursing schools, and there are not enough educators, clinical rotation spots or mentors for the next generation of nurses," the analysis states. "Progress may depend on creating attractive situations for nurse educators, a role traditionally plagued with shortages." Read full story Source: Becker's Hospital Review, 12 May 2022- Posted
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- Nurse
- Recruitment
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News Article
Dangerous staffing levels in Borders hospitals, says union
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
A trade union has written to every politician representing the Scottish Borders to highlight "dangerous staffing levels" in local hospitals. Unison claims serious breaches of safety guidelines are occurring daily due to a lack of nurses, auxiliaries and porters. The letter says staff are unable to take proper rest breaks or log serious incidents in the reporting system. NHS Borders said patient and staff safety was its number one priority. Unison said working conditions in the area were regularly in breach of regulations. Greig Kelbie, the union's regional officer in the Borders, said: "We are getting regular messages from our members to tell us about the pressure they are under - and that they can't cope. "The care system was under pressure before Covid, but the pandemic has exasperated the situation, particularly at NHS Borders. "The NHS has been stretched to its limits and it is now at the stage where it is dangerous for patients and staff - we're often told about serious breaches of health and safety, particularly at Borders General Hospital where there are issues with flooring and staff falling. "We work collaboratively with NHS Borders to do what we can, but we also wanted to make politicians aware of how bad things have become. "We need our politicians to step up and implement change - we want them to make sure the Health and Care Act is brought to the fore and that it protects our members." Read full story Source: BBC News, 13 May 2022- Posted
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- Scotland
- Safe staffing
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