“I drove home from work sobbing today knowing the patients I cared for didn’t get a fraction of the care I would consider acceptable.” That was the painful confession of one respondent to a survey by the Royal College of Nurses that has revealed the true devastating extent of the NHS’s critical lack of nursing staff.
Care Compromised
Some 36% of all respondents said they were so rushed and given so little time to do their jobs that they had to leave necessary patient care unfinished, with more than half saying care was compromised on their last shift.
Most felt “upset/sad” that they could not provide the level of care they wanted to give their patients, a form of frustration that the Nurses and Midwives Council identified earlier this year as one of the key reasons staff were leaving the profession.
The earlier NMC survey of 4,500 midwives and nurses who left the register in the past year found that retirement was responsible for only half of those departures.
When the rest were asked for their top three reasons for leaving the register a depressing 44% named working conditions, including poor staffing and a heavy workload. Disillusionment with the poor quality of patient care (27%) was just behind a change in personal circumstances such as poor health or childcare (28%) as the next biggest reason for leaving.
Cost-cutting
The RCN made a conservative estimate that NHS nurses do unpaid overtime worth £396 million a year. “As in many other professions nursing staff are happy to go the extra mile, especially when it means providing the level of care they know their patients deserve,” said its report.
“However, it is unacceptable for nursing staff to feel they have no other option than to work additional unpaid time for sustained periods to make up for the staffing shortages caused by short-sighted national policy decisions.”
Overall the report concluded that as ever the problem has been caused by cost-cutting. “Short-sighted cost-saving measures and lack of funding have been demonstrated to be significant factors in the issues described – an increase in funding will grow both ‘pools’ of posts to meet actual demand and numbers of qualified staff needed
. It will also lessen the pressures on the system so that patients can be put first again, with staff enabled to both deliver high-quality care and maintain their own well-being. This will improve retention rates and ultimately decrease the cost of agency (staff) and bank spend,” it said.
Janet Davies
Janet Davies, the RCN’s chief executive said the debate about health and care staffing often feels like it going nowhere. “The professions warn about falling numbers,” she said.
“The governments find a new way to present the figures. The experts raise unprecedented safety concerns. Again governments say it is under control. These conflicting messages can leave the public and the profession more than a little confused.”
“But when 30,000 professionals give you an account of their own last shift, they cannot be overlooked. These are personal experiences – too often desperately sad – and their truth will have its own power in driving the debate forward.”
by Stewart Vickers
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