Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust

Debate between Baroness Hayman of Ullock and Paula Sherriff

Monday 21st March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Paula Sherriff]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. I absolutely agree with her. We must also pay tribute to our incredible junior doctors.

Whatever difficulties the trust is facing, there can be no doubt that those working there on the frontline are blameless, and deserve our full backing. As Members of Parliament, we owe it to them to make sure that they are given all the support they need.

The trust and its staff have to work in a challenging environment. In the area covered by the trust, the overall health of the population is below the average for England. Deprivation is higher than average, and nearly 20% of children are living in poverty. Life expectancy is lower than the national average for both men and women.

The Care Quality Commission inspected the trust in July 2014, with a follow-up inspection in June 2015. An unannounced inspection of Pontefract hospital emergency department took place in July 2015. A second unannounced inspection took place in August 2015 at Pinderfields hospital, focusing on staffing levels, with a follow-up visit to Pinderfields in September.

Although there were some improvements between the two main inspections of 2014 and June 2015, there were also areas in which the trust’s performance had worryingly deteriorated, and there were still serious concerns about staffing levels. The CQC noted that there was still a significant shortage of nurses, which was having a knock-on effect on patient care, particularly on the medical care wards, in community inpatient services, in the specialist palliative care team and in end of life services.

Two weeks ago, my hon. Friend and I met the trust’s new interim chief executive. We were both very grateful to him for his candour. He told us that the leadership team has effectively been in crisis mode for the past 14 months. He said that the trust had recently put in an additional 120 beds across the trust to cope with increasing demand, but the 100 extra staff who should have accompanied that expansion are nowhere to be seen. The posts simply have not been filled.

[Sue Hayman (Workington) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the NHS’s problems in recruiting and retaining staff is one of the most critical issues facing our national health industry and our ability to manage our hospitals properly?

[Paula Sherriff]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I will come to that point later.

To make things more complex on the administrative side, the monthly staffing reports are found to be overly detailed, generally running to over 100 pages, making it difficult to identify the most urgent risks. Likewise, there are concerns that policies and procedures for the escalation of staffing risks were not always followed when they were identified. The trust aims for a ratio of one nurse to every eight patients on adult in-patient wards. The Royal College of Nursing recommends 6.7 patients per nurse on adult wards as a maximum, so one to eight is not too far wide of the mark, though not ideal. However, the CQC found that even the 1:8 ratio was very inconsistently met. During its unannounced visit to Pinderfields hospital in August, of the 17 wards only one was staffed to safe staffing levels. Ten were at minimum level and six were actually below the minimum. Indeed, records show that in August 2015 only 71% of nursing hours were achieved. Staff on the trust’s spinal injuries unit at Pinderfields are constantly reallocated to other wards, in essence robbing Peter to pay Paul. A nurse even told a patient that because they were so short-staffed, if two patients got into respiratory difficulties, which is not uncommon on a spinal injuries ward, the nurses would have to choose which patient they were to save.

The problem is particularly acute at the community in-patient sites at Monument house and Queen Elizabeth house, where between May and June last year 96% of shifts used at least one non-permanent member of staff, either agency staff or staff redeployed from other areas of the trust. Indeed, two shifts had only a single registered nurse on duty. The trust as a whole breached the Department’s cap on charges for agency staff, on average, 132 times a week during December. While it is absolutely right to prioritise patient safety over the Government’s financial targets, that is a clear indication that there has been a failure in long-term workforce planning and that it is struggling to attract and retain appropriately qualified staff.

To give credit where it is due, the trust has been making efforts to address the staffing issue. After the unannounced inspection, a risk summit was held under the leadership of NHS England to look at the actions the trust needs to undertake and the support needed from the wider healthcare community. The high number of registered nurse and care staff vacancies is now noted on the corporate risk register. The trust is looking at a range of different structures for nursing teams to get the best out of the available staff. It has invested in safety guardians to provide support and safeguarding for patients with mental health issues, freeing up time for registered nurses. It is putting extra effort and resources into filling gaps by looking to recruit nurses both locally and from Europe, proactively recruiting rather than waiting for staff to leave.

The CQC rated the safety of services provided by the trust as “inadequate”, largely due to the shortage of staff. For instance, between May 2014 and April 2015, 258 serious incidents were reported, of which 206 were cavity-like grade 3 pressure ulcers. That sort of thing is indicative of nursing staff being rushed off their feet, unable to provide the level of patient care that they would like. Concerns were also raised about patients who required one-to-one care not receiving it, and fluid balance monitoring and nutritional assessments not being properly completed, with charts often not kept fully up to date. In January, 81.4% of accident and emergency admissions were seen within four hours; the target is 95%. More than 2,000 patients waited on A&E trolleys for more than four hours, including six who waited more than 12 hours at Pinderfields.

When looking at such statistics on patient care, we have to be very careful to remember that each number—each percentage point—represents real people. They are people who may be in pain, or vulnerable, worried or nervous. They may be upset or distressed. By any reckoning, the NHS is our nation’s most prized institution, and when people have to make use of it, they rightly expect a certain level of service. NHS staff want to give that level of service, and when they cannot the result is more than just a delay in treatment—the dignity of patients is also compromised.

A few weeks ago I received an email from one of my constituents. Her 84-year-old father had been admitted to Dewsbury hospital with stroke-like symptoms. He was on a trolley in A&E for 14 hours. After he had been admitted to a ward, his daughter came back to visit him. She found that his bed was a complete mess and covered in food, and her father was naked from the waist down. When she asked why he had on only a pyjama top and was sitting on an incontinence pad, she was told that it made it easier when he needed to urinate. When she came back later that afternoon, his bedding had still not been changed, which in the end she did herself. That is a basic outline of one case, but it is by no means the only such correspondence that I have received from concerned constituents. At the moment I receive similar emails more than once a week, which is alarming.

All that, of course, has an inevitable knock-on effect on staff motivation. The results of the 2015 NHS staff survey show just how low morale has sunk. For every key indicator the results are depressing and fall well short of national averages. Only 54% of staff felt that the care of patients was the trust’s top priority, compared with a national average score of 73%, and 55% felt that the trust acts on concerns raised by patients, whereas the national average is 72%. Just 41% of people would recommend the trust as a place to work. Perhaps most damningly of all, only 46% of people would be happy for a friend or relative to receive care at the trust.

The amount of disciplinary action being taken against staff has risen in recent months, which is generally due to staff making minor mistakes or not being able to follow procedures through fully for want of time. That is a symptom of the shorthandedness that has been experienced on the wards, and it contributes to the general air of despondency as staff are effectively penalised for not being able to be in two places at once. I have spoken to a number of past and present members of staff in the trust, who informed me that they have failed to whistleblow for fear of retribution.

The feeling of being worn down is affecting staff at all levels. I was told by the interim chief executive last week that the board has effectively been operating in crisis mode for the past 14 months, which, of course, is now taking its toll. There is a general feeling of chaos, tempers are fraying, and there is severe instability in the personnel in management teams—a sure sign that the trust is struggling to get its problems under control, which is a challenge in itself.

To be fair, there have been some slight improvements recently. The CQC’s follow-up visits noted that staff were more confident than they had been previously, and that senior management were taking some concerns on board and trying to get to grips with the issues. However, that feeling was by no means universal, and that slight improvement from such a low base is hardly a cause for celebration.

On the underlying causes of these problems, the Government must take the lion’s share of the blame. Going right back to slashing nursing training places in 2010, they have failed to ensure that the NHS has the levels of staff it needs to provide a safe and caring service. Thousands of nurses who should have begun training between 2010 and 2012 and would now be qualified—thereby helping to alleviate the difficulties in Mid Yorkshire—are just not there. Applicants for nursing courses outnumber the available places by more than two to one.

The whole ethos of the NHS has been warped from one of service and care to one of financial management. Of course the health service must keep on an even keel, but when a cash-strapped trust feels that it is appropriate to hire city consultants such as Ernst & Young, alarm bells should start ringing. Thankfully, that contract finally came to an end last September, but not before the trust had stumped up more than £15 million. Given that staff are still struggling to keep their heads above water, they could be forgiven for questioning whether that was money well spent.