Unsafe nurse staffing: how has dangerous become ‘normal’?
Short-staffing at one acute hospital, as reported by RCNi, exemplifies widespread difficulties for nurses and healthcare support workers as health service budgets are squeezed and staffing cut. The article author says nurses have told her of their experience of unsafe staffing, and the impact this has on nurse health and well-being. A major survey of nursing staff backs this, pointing to the level of sickness absence among nursing staff likely to result from stress.
The short-staffing revealed at one acute hospital is a familiar difficulty for too many nurses and healthcare support workers as NHS spending cuts bite
The setting is a cardiology unit at one acute general hospital, but what is happening there – and getting nurses talking – could apply anywhere.
Concern that restrictions on bank shifts at Midland Metropolitan University Hospital near Birmingham are risking patient safety will strike a chord with many.
Staff at the hospital, run by Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust, have told us how cuts to bank shift spending have hit staffing ratios, reducing the combined total number of nurses and support staff on shift from nine to eight. One nurse told us of a shift when they were the sole nurse managing eight patients, as opposed to the customary four.
Nurse understaffing concerns are resonating across the profession
Every time we publish an article on understaffing issues we are, unsurprisingly, inundated with personal stories on social media from nursing professionals who have had similar experiences, and who fear for patients and are as exhausted and demoralised as counterparts at Midland Metropolitan.
I recently spoke with nurses attending Nursing Live, a CPD and holistic health event run by RCNi, who clearly love their jobs and their profession but are relying on daily self-care to protect them from burnout due to unsafe staffing. Paradoxically, the rota gaps are often due, they told me, to staff being off sick with stress-related illnesses.
Stress of nursing while coping with chronic short-staffing
A survey of 20,000 UK nursing staff published by the RCN last week found stress was the biggest cause of illness among respondents – reported by 65.1%, in fact, up 15 percentage points on 2017. A similar proportion, two thirds, admitted working when ill multiple times a year. The RCN wants safety-critical nurse-to-patient ratios.
Sandwell and West Birmingham trust says it is following national safe staffing guidance, and the government’s response to the RCN survey is to point to its nursing graduate job guarantee and efforts to improve conditions under the ten-year health plan.
Yet nurses all over the UK are trying to cope with the ‘normality’ of understaffing every day. As one put it on our Facebook page: ‘how is it deemed normal to be working with such dangerous nurse-patient ratios?’.
