Letters
Send your views by email to [email protected], the letters editor @RogerEvansE1, post on the Nursing Standard Facebook page or visit www.nursing-standard.co.uk
Please keep letters to a maximum of 200 words, and include your full name and a daytime telephone number. Letters may be edited
Safe staffing levels will be achieved through legal mandate, not tool kits I admire Welsh Liberal Democrat leader Kirsty Williams for taking the initiative to submit a Safe Nurse Staffing Levels (Wales) Bill to the Health And Social Care Committee of the Welsh Assembly (News March 25). But it is a travesty that Welsh health minister Mark Drakeford, who opposes the bill in its current form, believes enforcing the use of an acuity tool that is being developed in Wales will achieve the same aims as the bill. Workforce tools such as The Safer Nursing Care Tool Kit should be used to determine safe staffing levels, but they are not a panacea and their use should not be mandated. Evidence shows that one nurse caring for more than eight patients is unsafe, so it was equally disappointing when health minister Dan Poulter disagreed to a safer staffing level of one nurse to seven patients when questioned on this recently in the House of Commons. The advice the ministers are being given by senior management and nurse leaders must be fundamentally flawed – they need to read the research from nursing academic Linda Aiken on flexibility with the use of ratios. Or is their reluctance to implement legislated staffing levels simply down to cost? If so, they are failing to recognise the national and international evidence that shows safe nurse staffing levels result in more cost-effective care and a stable, well-motivated workforce. We have a serious shortage of registered nurses in the UK. Unless we have safe staffing levels to ensure safe practice across the whole of the NHS, nurses will continue to leave the profession and students will not apply for nursing courses because they won’t want to flout the Nursing and
Midwifery Council Code of Conduct and compromise their registration. Susan Osborne is chair of the Safe Staffing Alliance
SAYING MORE NURSES LEAD TO SAFER CARE IS A COSTLY ASSUMPTION I read June Clark’s comments about defining safe care (Letters March 25), citing ‘evidence’ that, she claims, shows an allocation of one nurse to eight patients is essential for safe care. But, in a recent edition of the Journal of Advanced Nursing (Vol 71, No 4), the report of a major study conducted in Australia presents a challenge to such claims. The study was carried out in 58 inpatient units, with a total of 265,984 hospitalisations assessed. The authors’ conclusions did not ‘support the widely held assumption that improved nurse staffing levels are associated with decreased patient complication levels’, and said ‘adding more nurses is not a panacea for reducing complications to zero’. Quite a challenge.
Clearly, discussion about correlations between nurse-patient ratios and safe/unsafe nursing care needs strong, supportive evidence rather than well-meaning passionate rhetoric. I sincerely believe that the NHS is a gem in our civilization, but it continues to be an increasingly costly service that, realistically, cannot be governed with an open cheque book for much longer. Dr James P Smith, Fochabers Scotland
ONLY LEGISLATION AND MONITORING WILL IMPROVE FOOD STANDARDS The Department of Health (DH)’s new hospital food standards are inexcusably weak. We are told by the department that hospitals have a contractual obligation to meet the standards under their commissioning contracts (Analysis March 25), but the lack of legislation to back this up – along with the government’s failure to hand responsibility for monitoring and evaluating the standards to an independent body – means we cannot
34 april 1 :: vol 29 noRCNi.com 31 :: 2015by ${individualUser.displayName} on Jul 20, 2016. For personal use only. No NURSING STANDARD Downloaded from other uses without permission. Copyright © 2016 RCNi Ltd. All rights reserved.
Send your views by email to [email protected], the letters editor @RogerEvansE1, post on the Nursing Standard Facebook page or visit www.nursing-standard.co.uk
Please keep letters to a maximum of 200 words, and include your full name and a daytime telephone number. Letters may be edited
Safe staffing levels will be achieved through legal mandate, not tool kits I admire Welsh Liberal Democrat leader Kirsty Williams for taking the initiative to submit a Safe Nurse Staffing Levels (Wales) Bill to the Health And Social Care Committee of the Welsh Assembly (News March 25). But it is a travesty that Welsh health minister Mark Drakeford, who opposes the bill in its current form, believes enforcing the use of an acuity tool that is being developed in Wales will achieve the same aims as the bill. Workforce tools such as The Safer Nursing Care Tool Kit should be used to determine safe staffing levels, but they are not a panacea and their use should not be mandated. Evidence shows that one nurse caring for more than eight patients is unsafe, so it was equally disappointing when health minister Dan Poulter disagreed to a safer staffing level of one nurse to seven patients when questioned on this recently in the House of Commons. The advice the ministers are being given by senior management and nurse leaders must be fundamentally flawed – they need to read the research from nursing academic Linda Aiken on flexibility with the use of ratios. Or is their reluctance to implement legislated staffing levels simply down to cost? If so, they are failing to recognise the national and international evidence that shows safe nurse staffing levels result in more cost-effective care and a stable, well-motivated workforce. We have a serious shortage of registered nurses in the UK. Unless we have safe staffing levels to ensure safe practice across the whole of the NHS, nurses will continue to leave the profession and students will not apply for nursing courses because they won’t want to flout the Nursing and
Midwifery Council Code of Conduct and compromise their registration. Susan Osborne is chair of the Safe Staffing Alliance
SAYING MORE NURSES LEAD TO SAFER CARE IS A COSTLY ASSUMPTION I read June Clark’s comments about defining safe care (Letters March 25), citing ‘evidence’ that, she claims, shows an allocation of one nurse to eight patients is essential for safe care. But, in a recent edition of the Journal of Advanced Nursing (Vol 71, No 4), the report of a major study conducted in Australia presents a challenge to such claims. The study was carried out in 58 inpatient units, with a total of 265,984 hospitalisations assessed. The authors’ conclusions did not ‘support the widely held assumption that improved nurse staffing levels are associated with decreased patient complication levels’, and said ‘adding more nurses is not a panacea for reducing complications to zero’. Quite a challenge.
Clearly, discussion about correlations between nurse-patient ratios and safe/unsafe nursing care needs strong, supportive evidence rather than well-meaning passionate rhetoric. I sincerely believe that the NHS is a gem in our civilization, but it continues to be an increasingly costly service that, realistically, cannot be governed with an open cheque book for much longer. Dr James P Smith, Fochabers Scotland
ONLY LEGISLATION AND MONITORING WILL IMPROVE FOOD STANDARDS The Department of Health (DH)’s new hospital food standards are inexcusably weak. We are told by the department that hospitals have a contractual obligation to meet the standards under their commissioning contracts (Analysis March 25), but the lack of legislation to back this up – along with the government’s failure to hand responsibility for monitoring and evaluating the standards to an independent body – means we cannot
34 april 1 :: vol 29 noRCNi.com 31 :: 2015by ${individualUser.displayName} on Jul 20, 2016. For personal use only. No NURSING STANDARD Downloaded from other uses without permission. Copyright © 2016 RCNi Ltd. All rights reserved.
