18.09.13
Hospitals should provide real-time staffing levels to public – Health Committee
The Health Select Committee is urging NHS to make hospital trusts provide the public with real-time information on staffing levels.
The Government is to produce guidance on safe minimum staffing levels, with trust publishing their figures twice a year, but the MPs on the committee want them to go further and copy the example of Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust, whose patient safety record is exemplary and which is proposing to share nursing staff numbers with patients.
But health minister Lord Howe said: “We agree that transparency on staffing numbers and making those numbers visible on the wards are a good thing. Patient safety experts agree that safe staff-patient ratios should be set locally. It is not for Whitehall to set one-size-fits-all staffing rules.”
The Francis report said this: “The standard procedures and practice [for setting fundamental standards] should include evidence-based tools for establishing what each service is likely to require as a minimum in terms of staff numbers and skill mix. This should include nursing staff on wards, as well as clinical staff. These tools should be created after appropriate input from specialties, professional organisations, and patient and public representatives, and consideration of the benefits and value for money of possible staff: patient ratios.”
The recommendations on minimum staffing are in the Committee’s response to the Francis report, ‘After Francis: making a difference’.
It says: “The Committee recommends that commissioners should, via the NHS standard contract, require all care providers to collect information on the deployment of registered nurses and other healthcare staff at ward level on a daily basis, and make it available immediately to commissioners for publication in a standard format which will enable ready monitoring, analysis and comparison by all stakeholders. This should include making the information available in individual health and care settings.
“The Committee has not undertaken an in-depth review of safe staffing issues, but has been impressed by the approach of Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust to the development of a staffing management tool. This appears to the Committee to be good practice, and the Committee recommends the adoption of this or similar systems across the NHS.”
Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham MP said: “More than six months after the Francis report, the Government still has no plan to implement its recommendations. One report after another has highlighted the importance of safe staffing levels in the NHS, yet more than 5,000 nursing jobs have already been lost since the election.”
The full committee report also covers whistleblowing and gagging clauses, criminally negligent practice, nurse and healthcare assistant training, the future of the CQC and Monitor, and the establishment of fundamental standards of healthcare.
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