Barts and London NHS Trust is planning to reduce the proportion of qualified nurses on its wards as part of a two-year programme of cuts, it emerged yesterday.
Trust documents outline a plan to save £56m by cutting more than 250 nursing posts among 630 jobs being axed.
About 100 beds including 22 cancer beds have already been axed.
The overall staffing establishment is about 7,400 and there are already about 500 unfilled posts.
Details of a package drawn up by the trust – which runs Barts, the Royal London and the London Chest Hospital – reveal plans for a minimum of just one qualified nurse to seven patients on general wards, although higher ratios will be kept in some areas including critical care.
The trust claims that the present ratio of 80 per cent of qualified nurses to 20 per cent unqualified support staff is higher than comparable trusts and should be reduced to 70 to 30, as already exists in Barts’ cancer centre, opened by health secretary Lansley last month.
It also says there are too few senior nurses on wards so the trust will cut ‘non-ward-based’ posts.
Posts linked to Macmillan Cancer Support are among those at risk.
RCN head of policy Howard Catton warned: ‘Just because you may be above a benchmark, that is not a good enough reason to say “we have to go down to the level of the benchmark”.
‘Barts is in one of the world’s major cities, is a teaching centre and has a more complex mix of patients, sometimes with rare conditions and diseases.
‘There may be very good reasons why they have a higher skill mix because of the patients they have and their teaching and research responsibilities.’
He added: ‘Seven (patients per nurse) is a bit at the high end for me. I would prefer to see five or six.’
He added that with patients being discharged and others being admitted to wards, there could at times be one nurse to ten patients.
‘That takes one into territory where risks increase,’ he concluded.
He also raised concerns over cutting non-ward based and specialist nurses.
l Dangerously low levels of trained NHS paediatricians and under-investment is compromising the care of children and putting lives at risk, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) has warned.
RCPCH president, Professor Terence Stephenson, said: ‘There are huge pressures on paediatric services and it is crucial that standards of care for children are not compromised.’
He added that the situation is so bad that in some cases trainee doctors are left to manage wards due to a shortage in senior level consultants posts.
In a new report, the RCPCH recommends increasing the number of paediatric consultant posts by 50 per cent.
It also suggests a ‘significant expansion’ in the number of highly skilled children’s nurses and more opportunities for GPs to gain children’s hospital experience.
