A third of nurses confident their organisations are dealing with swine flu

An exclusive survey by Nursing Times and its sister title the Health Service Journal revealed that 37% of nurses believed their organisations were coping with increased patient numbers created by the pandemic.

However, 17% did not believe their organisation was on top of the problem.

The Nursing Times/HSJ survey showed that managers were generally more confident than clinical staff about the response of NHS and other health bodies to swine flu (see chart 1).

Only 12% said that, to date, their organisations had cancelled or delayed less urgent work and a further 26% were unsure if this had happened.

The picture was more mixed when nurses were asked if their employers had ‘a robust strategy in place to minimise the impact on services of an outbreak among staff ’ - 34% of nurses said ‘yes’ but 40% said ‘no’.

Half of the nurses said their employer had not given them advice about whether or not they should come to work if they had been in close contact with someone with swine flu.

Only 15% said they would avoid going in to work if there was a swine flu outbreak among staff.

Nurses were pessimistic when it came to predicting how well their organisations would cope with the expected surge in swine flu patients in the autumn.

Respondents were asked to rate their organisations’ readiness ‘to deal with the greater demand on services expected later’ on a scale of 1-10, where 1 indicated ‘no confidence’ and 10 ‘extreme confidence’.

Thirty per cent of nurses gave their employers a score of 1-3, while only 18% scored them 8-10. Again, managers were noticeably more confident than clinical staff.

All the staff surveyed were less confident about the NHS’s ability as a whole to tackle swineflu.

Only 14% rated NHS readiness at 8-10, compared with 25% who gave the same scores to their own organisation.

Much concern was focused on the proposal to vaccinate all those who might need it.

Asked to rate their confidence about the plan, 36% gave a score of 1-3 and only 14% of 8-10. Confidence that there would be adequate supplies of vaccine was scored on average 4.8 on the 1-10 scale.

Government attempts to educate NHS staff about swine flu seemed to be working, but a significant majority of staff were still in the dark (see Chart 2 ).

Over one-quarter of nurses were not confident they could identify the clinical signs of swine flu. Nineteen per cent of nurses said they would be willing to move temporarily to a different part of the country to help in areas worse affected by swine flu.

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