Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust

Barbara Keeley Excerpts

Tuesday 19th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to focus on those pressures. We have been thinking about this very hard. Over the summer we announced £250 million to be distributed to the 53 A and E economies where the most difficulty is being experienced in meeting high standards for the public, and we are doing more. We are talking to the College of Emergency Medicine. Anything that my hon. Friend can do at a local level will be greatly appreciated. This is going to be a difficult winter and we need to stand full square behind our front-line staff.

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State just said that Salford Royal hospital is one of the best hospitals in the country and we should learn from what it does. What it does is support minimum safe staffing levels for patients and then publish the actual-versus-planned staffing levels on the wards every day. Staffing levels published on websites is a little step forward, but it is not enough. Why do we not learn from what Salford Royal does? I do not think that patients and their families are interested in what the staffing levels were a month ago; they are interested in what they are today.

[Mr Hunt]

We have based our recommendation today precisely on what Salford Royal does. It uses the kind of model to ensure minimum recommended staffing levels on every ward that we want every hospital to use. We say that we want those data published monthly, but that is a minimum. Salford Royal publishes them every day, which is very impressive. Given that most hospitals are not using tools anything like as sophisticated as that, it will be a big step up for most hospitals to do that. We want to do it. What is significant about our announcement is that we want to assemble those data for every trust in the country so that they can be compared on a monthly basis and so that people can know how many wards and how many shifts are being safely staffed at their local hospital compared with neighbouring hospitals.