Maintain pressure on reforms to protect NHSQuality programme to highlight understaffed wards
A major nursing improvement programme, due to be launched during the spring, is expected to reveal many general and geriatric hospital wards are under-nursed while other areas have too many.
Energise for Excellence – a quality initiative being led by England’s regional nursing directors – includes a workforce planning component, which is being developed under the name Safer Care.
NHS South Central chief nurse Katherine Fenton told Nursing Times that the Safer Care tool will allow senior nurses to regularly compare staff numbers and skill-mix on each ward against best practice.
Its developers hope it will help them improve safety by moving nurses to where they are needed most, and demonstrate if they need more across the hospital.
Ms Fenton said forerunners of the Safer Care tool have often revealed hospitals are overstaffed in one area and understaffed in another, meaning they did not need to increase their overall number of nurses.
Generally, she said, “areas such as intensive care and specialisms have more nurses, and areas such as medical and elderly care have less”.
The tool will be able “to help us put nurses into where we really need them”, she added.
Safer Care is just one part of the Energise for Excellence project, which Ms Fenton has developed with NHS North West chief nurse Jane Cummings. The aim is to improve safety, effectiveness and patient experience by encouraging and inspiring nurses.
It will encourage the wider use of indicators to measure the impact of nursing care and support the “high impact actions”, which the chief nursing officer for England Dame Christine Beasley has identified to improve quality and productivity.
As revealed by Nursing Times last year, the nurse-specific quality indicators in the project are likely to include falls, pressure ulcers and nutrition (news, 4 August 2009, page 1).
The regional directors of nursing want Energise for Excellence to link staff levels with delivering good care, measuring the quality of care and improving patient experience and staff experience.
Ms Fenton said it would empower nurses to improve care by providing support such as tools and networking events. She said: “We are energising people from the front line to want to do better than they are now
“If a nurse wants to do something different she will have the somewhere to go and get started,” she said.
Have your say
You must sign in to make a comment.
Online training units, written and reviewed by experts. Earn two hours' CPD and a personalised certificate for your portfolio.
Subscribers get five FREE learning units and non-subscribers can access each learning unit for £10 + VAT.
Share
Readers' comments (4)
Anonymous | 18-Feb-2010 8:26 am
another example of people in high paid jobs justifying their existence by stating the bloody obvious. every nurse in the country knows this. Why don't all you 'high-flyers' and others in high places get off your backsides and do something useful for once like ENSURE (not promise with weak ineffectual rhetoric about 'industrial action' and the like, or 'pressure groups' -don't make me laugh -what 'pressure'?) that pay and conditions improve -then maybe ALL areas will be well staffed
Unsuitable or offensive?
Anonymous | 18-Feb-2010 10:39 am
Here, here to the last posted comment. It makes you want to swear reading this diatribe of rhetoric. It's unrelenting! blah, blah, blah and nothing gets done. Mangers deliberately keep staffing as low as they possibly can to save money, while the staff on the front line become exhausted from not being able to do their jobs to any decent standard. Coping is not the same as caring and after more than 20 years of nursing or rather coping i am looking forward to retiring, but what a shame when i came into nursing full of enthusiasm to end up so worn out and cynical.
Unsuitable or offensive?
Anonymous | 19-Feb-2010 2:20 pm
I agree with the previous comments. It was ever thus that staffing levels are inadequate, and the only way it will change is when minimum staffing levels are made legal. After all would airlines fly their planes without a full crew?
Unsuitable or offensive?
Anonymous | 21-Feb-2010 9:02 am
Another example of robbing peter to staff paul. Some areas such as ITU need more staff. the clue is in the name - INTENSIVE CARE. Moving staff may solve a very short term (? chronic ) problem but does nothing to improve staff morale or patient care. How can staff unfamiliar with a ward or even possibley with patients conditions be expected to provide good, safe care.
Unsuitable or offensive?