THE ‘SAFE staffing levels’ for hospitals across the UK have been suspended, sending alarm bells ringing throughout the NHS.
This has prompted the Royal College of Nurses (RCN) to warn yesterday that ‘straying from this course now would be failing both staff and patients’. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) had produced guidance on safe staffing levels in two settings: adult acute wards and maternity.
It recommended a minimum of one nurse per four cubicles in accident and emergency departments and one midwife to each woman during birth. Under instructions from NHS England, both of these ‘safe staffing levels’ have been suspended, raising fears that dangerous lower ratios of staff to patients will now be considered acceptable. ‘Safe Staffing levels’ were urgently put into place after it emerged that a shortage of staff at Mid Staffordshire hospital contributed to over a thousand patient deaths.
Dr Peter Carter, Chief Executive & General Secretary of the RCN said: ‘It is widely recognised that you need the right number of nursing staff on wards to make sure patients get high quality and safe care. If staffing levels are not based on evidence there is a danger they will be based on cost. We must not repeat the mistakes of the past, where staffing levels were cut to save money, and patients suffered as a result.
‘We are concerned that this move is driven by affordability, and patients and staff must be assured that this is not the case. Whatever replaces the NICE guidelines must continue to emulate their evidence-based and safety-focused approach. Straying from this course now would be failing both staff and patients.’
Meanwhile, Tory Chancellor Osborne has announced a staggering £200m is to be cut from public health budgets within a year. The cut was revealed yesterday afternoon, and was billed as a saving of £200m on ‘non-NHS’ spending. However, in what can be considered a cheap parlour trick, the services affected, although not run by the NHS are vital health services. They are services that used to be run by the NHS but have now been taken over by the local councils.
Until 1 April 2013, public health budgets were managed by NHS commissioners, before being transferred to local authorities under the Health Act 2012. Among the services funded by councils via their public health budgets are: school nursing; screening programmes; drug and substance misuse programmes; smoking cessation services; and sexual health schemes, including HIV prevention.
Meanwhile, Tory Secretary for Health Jeremy Hunt has asked the Care Quality Commission to include a hospital’s ‘efficiency’ as one of the ‘key criteria’ in rating the hospital. This means that the Care Quality Commission’s remit has been changed to assessing how well a hospital enforces cuts and closures!
Hunt said he did not want a situation where ‘we have the government and Monitor asking for transformation and efficiency, and the CQC inspection regime asking for a different set of priorities around safety and quality’.
