UK Hospitals need more nurses to cope with high patient demand
by Olivia Eden-Brown
With the NHS constantly in the news, many hospitals are struggling with bed numbers and high patient demand.
On top of this, 96% of hospitals across England have failed to meet ‘safe staffing’ numbers with more nurses’ shifts being unfilled.
The patient demand has been increasing faster than the budget and together with the lack of nurses, this has put a strain on their ability to do their job.
Catherine Fookes, a nurse at Ashford and St Peter’s Hospital said that the night shifts are suffering more than the day.
“If you’re a few short on the day shift it’s bad enough but the nights are worse, it’s a lot harder. When I was a student nurse I was heavily relied upon by other nurses but there’s still not enough student nurses.
“When you don’t have enough staff for the amount of patients it puts massive pressure on the nurses that are there and it makes it incredibly hard for you to do the job that you are there to do.
“I think that if you got young people to do work experience in healthcare it could encourage them to take up nursing, as they would show them how rewarding working in the industry is.”
Nursing at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, student nurse Megan Catterson said: “most wards I’ve been in love it when the students are there because it’s an extra pair of trained hands. Healthcare assistants are all well and good but a lot of things they aren’t allowed to do.
“They wash patients, help them to the toilet, things like that. They aren’t qualified to do wound dressings, observations, give medicines and stuff like that.”
With around 24,000 vacancies across the UK for nurses it has lead to substandard care and patient safety problems.
“I think it puts a huge strain on a nurse’s duty of care, especially if patients become really unwell. It stretches nurses beyond their capabilities because they’re trying to care for so many patients at once,” she continued.
“I think a lot of people are put off taking up nursing by all the bad press, but personally I think it’s one of those careers you need to really want to do. If people aren’t passionate about it then they aren’t going to make good nurses.”
The lack of nurses really affects patients; with observations being missed it means that the patient deteriorates, putting immense stress on the nurses that are working at the time and the nurses on the next shift, because that deterioration could have been prevented.
Annabelle Williams, a nursing student at Southampton University said: “The NHS is understaffed and the nurses are worked off their feet to maintain that level of care, I’ve not witnessed to the degree that patients aren’t getting their medication on time or being observed so nurses don’t recognise their deterioration, but that might be in other hospitals.
“However, they do heavily rely on student nurses to help out with a lot of tasks which do include taking observations and being responsible for letting nurses know patients deterioration and sometimes the healthcare assistants too,” she continued.
She thinks that just a couple more nurses per shift on the ward would help massively, “I feel like with just one or two more staff, it would make everyone’s lives, I feel like we could meet all the patients needs, it’s hard sometimes to offer the holistic side of nursing when the ward is at capacity and that’s the important part of nursing.”
The Health Service Journal (HSJ) found that hospitals were employing more and more healthcare assistants, which suggests that they were replacing nurses with cheaper staff who have little medical training.
Does this have a link with how 76% of NHS hospital trusts across the UK are rapidly failing to meet their health and wellbeing demands?
With corners being cut every day and nurses not being able to make all their observations, safety is constantly being compromised, and in November research showed that patients are 1/5th more likely to die in hospitals where nurses are replaced with less qualified staff.
A Department of Health spokesman said: “We expect all parts of the NHS to make sure they have the right staff in the right place at the right time to provide safe care – that’s why there are already almost 26,000 extra clinical staff, including almost 11,400 additional doctors and over 11,200 additional nurses on our wards since May 2010.”
