Safer staffing
We are committed to providing high quality, safe and compassionate nursing and midwifery care for all our patients.
To ensure that we deliver this, we need to ensure we have the right staff with the right skills in the right place at the right time.
From April 2014, it became a national requirement for all hospitals to publish information about staffing levels on wards and to publicly display the details of planned and actual staffing levels at the entrances to all wards.
The Trust is committed to being open and transparent about staffing levels and recognises that these are critical to providing good quality safe care to patients.
Each month the Trust publishes staffing levels across the organisation; this information is available on NHS Choices.
We use a number of tools to assess what the correct safe staffing should be for the different wards and departments. This is based on how unwell or dependent the patients are on that particular ward and the level of care they need. We use the Safer Nursing Care Tool (SNCT) as well as professional judgement of the senior nurses working in the area. It is important to take into account the judgement of very experienced nurses, who know the wards and the patients’ level of need, in conjunction with this tool, to calculate the acuity needs of the patient.
The Trust takes nursing and midwifery staffing levels very seriously and a number of processes are in place to ensure that our wards are safely staffed.
What do we do to check our staffing levels are safe?
- Six monthly nursing and midwifery skill mix reviews presented at Public Trust Board
- Daily review of planned versus actual staffing levels, which are reported monthly
- Staffing data displayed on each ward per shift
- Review patient acuity daily in conjunction with a shift by shift review of staffing numbers
- The Trust has a robust Recruitment and Retention plan to ensure we have the right staff with the right skills in place.
The information described below is the monthly fill % for planned versus actual staffing levels: