Nurses

(asked on 1st February 2018) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the effect of current nursing staffing levels on patient safety.


Answered by
Caroline Dinenage Portrait
Caroline Dinenage
This question was answered on 7th February 2018

Local National Health Service trusts and commissioners have responsibility for ensuring high-quality, safe and financially sustainable services, and are expected to consider a basket of measures to assess whether nursing staffing levels for their organisation are appropriate.

At a national level, in July 2016, the National Quality Board issued updated staffing guidance, ‘Supporting NHS providers to deliver the right staff, with the right skills, in the right place at the right time, to support local decision making’, which advises NHS trusts to consider safe staffing levels in the context of this basket of measures.

NHS Improvement collects monthly data returns on staffing levels, vacancy, fill rates, agency data and also quality metrics such as patient safety thermometer and safety incidents. This data is reviewed monthly by regional NHS Improvement teams to support NHS objectives. There are triggers and criteria in the data sets that flag NHS trusts which have staffing and safety issues and these are placed on higher surveillance, with regular input via NHS Improvement teams, to ensure safety and quality.

The latest statistics for October 2017 show that since May 2010, there are now almost 42,700 more professionally qualified clinical staff (full time equivalent) working in NHS trusts and clinical commissioning groups – this includes over 14,200 (9%) more nurses onwards.

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