£3m nursing cover cash boost to comply with staffing laws
HEALTH chiefs in the ABMU region are to spend an extra £3 million on nurses in order to comply with Wales-wide staffing legislation.
The nurses – some of them from more expensive nursing agencies – will be deployed in “hotspot” hospital wards where care quality concerns and risks to patients have been identified.
Health boards have to comply with the Nurse Staffing (Wales) Act, the final requirements of which came into effect in April this year.
It means “all reasonable steps” must be taken to maintain nurse staffing levels in adult in-patient medical and surgery wards.
Abertawe Bro Morgannwg University Health Board, which covers Bridgend, Swansea and Neath Port Talbot currently has 288 staff nurse vacancies at Band Five pay level and has found recruitment an ongoing challenge.
With the act in mind, board chiefs have calculated that they need an extra 52 nurses and 135 health care support workers undertaking nursing duties at 38 wards in Morriston, Singleton, Neath Port Talbot and Princess of Wales hospitals.
But they felt they could not recruit this number in the immediate or shortterm - an option which would cost £5.5 million per year – so have decided instead to target “hotspot” wards with extra resources.
“Despite every effort to fill roster gaps with relocated nurses, bank and agency it is not always possible to provide the staff required,” said a health board report.
It added that “serious incidents have resulted in areas with staffing deficits,” all of which must be reported to the Welsh Government.
An analysis of the staff nursing options said recruiting the full complement of 52 nurses and 135 healthcare support workers would be likely to improve the service to patients and also benefit staff, with more sharing the workload.
But it warned that the £5.5 million cost would force extra savings to be made elsewhere and might also destabilise the local care home and domiciliary care workforce, which includes many healthcare support workers.
Another option, which was also discounted, involved rearranging wards to fit the number of registered nurses available.
The chosen “hotspot” option, despite being cheaper than recruiting the full complement, will require a lot of planning and background work. Meanwhile the act also means health boards must have a system in place to allow nurses to highlight staff deficits to senior colleagues, a system to report incidents ranging from “near-misses” to those which cause harm to patients, and a system for requesting temporary staff.
Other health boards in Wales are having to recruit more nurses to meet the requirements of the act. For example Hywel Dda University Health Board, which covers Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire, needs extra staff for 32 of its wards.
ABMU is holding recruitment days for prospective nurses at the Princess of Wales Hospital, Bridgend, on July 10 and Morriston Hospital on July 14.
“Teams of our people will be there on the day and we carry out interviews,” said an ABMU spokeswoman.