Inside Health
Prof Michael Lavelle-jones reflects on the importance of staffing for safe care
Right staff, right skills, right place, right time – it’s a mantra crucial to the delivery of safe patient care. As surgeons we cannot do our job when these principles aren’t delivered in practice. It’s something that applies to all of us in the NHS, no matter what our professional background. That’s why the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh fully supports the Royal College of Nursing in its campaign to ensure none of us lose sight of the goal: staffing for safe and effective care.
It’s apt that nursing is leading the charge on this because the nursing profession is at the forefront of patient care, which means it feels the pressure from all directions. Medical colleagues, managers, patients and their families all interact with nursing teams on a daily basis. All too often I hear from senior charge nurse colleagues that administrative pressures and bureaucracy distance them from patient care to the extent that they can no longer function as role models to junior team members. This must change. Senior charge nurses in acute settings are clinical leaders. These are the nurses who are central to ensuring that the “right staff, right skills, right time” mantra is a reality.
But senior charge nurse colleagues are often bound in such bureaucratic processes that they are unable to thrive, and do not derive the job satisfaction that led them to choose the nursing profession in the first place.
I believe this is the ideal time to look again at the role of Scotland’s senior charge nurses to ensure that they have the time to deliver in the clinical setting.
The rise in roles such as extended role nurse practitioner often re-designates an existing member of the team, leaving a gap in the service. It is frequently the nursing service on wards which suffers as experienced nurses are drawn away to other areas of consequence. As professional colleagues, and as patients, we must value all nursing roles and lobby for adequate resources to ensure that there are enough nurses to provide safe care to patients, wherever that care is delivered.
There are other areas of concern too, for example when an extended role nurse practitioner trained in the role of a surgical first assistant has to continue operating as a scrub nurse because of staffing level difficulties. This can have a longer term impact.
This summer we have introduced the new “improving surgical training” programme designed to deliver exactly that – better training for surgeons in training. Nurse practitioners will play a pivotal role in supporting surgical teams to ensure that trainees can have the time required to access this additional training – relieving pressure, where appropriate, in the ward, theatre and outpatient setting.
Valuing our workforce is one of the key elements of putting “Realistic Medicine” into practice in Scotland – all of its principles apply to the nursing profession as well as the medical profession. Elsewhere, in Wales, in a similar initiative called “Prudent Practice”, I have been struck by one of their underpinning principles: “only do what only you can do”. This seems to me to represent the future as we reshape our healthcare teams, optimising the roles of each team member – right staff, right skills, right place, right time. l Professor Michael Lavelle-jones is president of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, and a consultant general surgeon at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee.