02.07.11
Nursing a grievance
Nurses say there are too few staff on NHS wards – but can there ever be enough?
Patient care can almost always be improved, so it is hard to imagine what an ‘over-staffed’ hospital would look like.
Maybe it is too easy to be cynical and suggest that frontline public sector workers have an obvious incentive to play up resource problems in their organisation to show that job cuts would be a mistake. Many nurses are undoubtedly giving their honest appraisal of patient care on the wards where they work, and plenty of reviews and inquiries have suggested the same thing.
But it is still unclear what sort of impact seemingly inevitable job losses will have, especially with money clawed back through efficiency savings earmarked for reinvestment in the NHS. Is the Government really ready to risk thousands of nurses’ jobs – and will we believe them when they tell us how bad things are getting?
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