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We want to provide exceptional patient care and deliver the best clinical outcomes and experiences for patients, and our Nurses, midwives and care staff are committed to providing compassionate and skilled care to patients and those important to them every day.
With this in mind, we monitor not just the number of registered nurses, midwives and care staff on duty on each ward, but we also consider the level of nursing and midwifery skill required.
We formally review our nursing and midwifery staffing levels using a number of tools to assess what the correct safe staffing levels should be for different wards and areas. This is based on how sick or dependent the patients are on that particular ward and the level of care they need. We use the Safer Nursing Care Tool as well as the professional judgement of senior nurses working in the areas. It is important to take into account the judgement of the very experienced nurses who know the wards and the patient’s level of need alongside using evidenced-based tools and patient-to-nurse ratios..
We continually monitor patient outcomes and quality indicators, and these are also included in the consideration when establishing nurse/midwifery staffing levels. “Nurse-sensitive” indicators include Patient Falls, Pressure Ulcers, Infection rates and Medication Incidents
On all our wards, we have other trained colleagues who provide care for patients alongside the Registered Nurses and Midwives on duty.
In some areas, there may be a need for a higher ratio of Registrants. In other areas, patients may not need such a high ratio of Registered Nurses because they are not as acutely ill anymore.
You can be assured that when we determine safe levels of care for our wards it is only after robust consideration of the level of care and acuity of the patient’s medical condition.
Of course, like every other hospital, we do have occasions when staffing levels may be lower during a shift because of unexpected staff sickness or other legitimate reasons. However, we have a team working around the clock to manage this across the site. This helps manage unexpected staff sickness or other issues which may mean a ward needs to call upon additional staffing.
We display the actual and planned staffing levels on all our wards on a shift-by-shift basis and this information for the previous month will also be available by clicking the links below. We assess the required nurse staffing levels on all our wards twice a year and report this to our public Board meeting too. Find the latest report below:
