Twice a year, we review the number of registered and unregistered nurses on all of our wards. We also compare our staffing levels with similar size hospitals and make recommendations to our Trust Board. The latest updates can be found in the Trust’s most recent board report.
Each day our matrons and senior nurses undertake regular assessments of how many staff are needed on each shift, to make sure the wards are staffed safely. The number of staff needed can be affected by how many patients we are caring for and how unwell these patients are. For example, patients with complex health needs will need more intensive nursing care.
Information about our staffing levels are discussed in public at our bi-monthly Trust Board meetings and can be downloaded using the links below.
Safe staffing levels – monthly updates
All hospitals with inpatient beds must publish their staff fill rates (actual versus planned). This means that we need to compare how many Registered nurse and Unregistered nurse hours should be provided during the day and night for the month, with the number of hours that were actually provided for the month.
Patients in our care with complex health needs may require one to one care, for example patients who are at a high risk of having a fall or patients with dementia. For these patients we book additional staff, over and above what the plan for the ward would have been. View our fill rate data from 1 – 31 December.
Further information about the work we do to make sure our wards have safe nurse staffing levels can be found in the reports presented every month to our risk and quality committee, which in turn reports in to the Trust Board at its bi-monthly meetings. The latest updates can be found in the Trust’s most recent board report.
Staffing posters on our wards
Each of our wards at the Lister hospital and Mount Vernon Cancer Centre has a ‘staffing status’ poster at the entrance to the ward. Our senior nurses update the poster up to three times a day so patients and visitors can see the number of planned staff, and how many staff we actually have working on that shift. This includes nurses, student nurses, clinical support workers, ward clerk and housekeeper. The posters also show the named nurse in charge of the ward that day and when the poster was last updated.
