Nurses 'too busy' to give best care

Published on Sunday 18 October 2009 23:10

NURSES in Scotland are too busy and short-staffed to give patients the highest standards of care, researchers have found.

A survey by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) found that more than half – 52 per cent – of all NHS nurses in Scotland said they were too busy to provide the standard of care they would like to deliver.

The number of nurses working in the NHS has increased in the past decade. Figures suggest that the number of nursing and midwifery staff in Scotland has gone up by more than ten per cent since 1998.

Funding for the health service has also more than doubled in a decade. But the RCN said the amount of work nurses were expected to do had also increased.

The Scottish Government yesterday maintained they were committed to providing patients in Scotland with nursing services to meet their needs.

The report was published after health secretary Nicola Sturgeon revealed efficiency measures have saved the NHS almost 300 million pounds.

A source close to Ms Sturgeon said: "This money is being re-invested in employing more nurses. And it is also being re- invested to employ more doctors and more dentists."

The Nurses' Employment and Morale 2009 survey, covering 9,000 nurses across the UK, found that four out of ten (44 per cent) of those working in Scotland said that patient care was compromised at least once or twice per week, with 51 per cent saying that there are not sufficient staff to meet the needs of those they were caring for.

The poll found that 57 per cent of nurses in the NHS thought their workload was too heavy.

Nurses say they would like to spend more time talking to patients and answering their questions, as well as carrying out more preventative work to reduce problems in the future. But their workload meant this was just not possible.

The RCN also said that the number of patients each nurse had to care for had gone up in the last two years.

During the day, they found that the number of patients per registered nurse (RN) on hospital wards had increased from an average of 6.7 per RN in 2007 to 7.2 in 2009. At night, the figure went up from 9.6 to 11.1.

Funding for the NHS in Scotland has increased substantially in recent years.

But the RCN has recently raised concerns that funding for nurse training appeared to be falling in future budgets.

RCN Scotland director Theresa Fyffe said they were very concerned about the impact on patient care revealed by their survey. "Today's report shows that a lot of nurses and healthcare assistants feel up against it and not able, because of workload pressures, to deliver the quality of care they want to and for which they have been trained," she said.

Ms Fyffe said they had raised concerns with the Scottish Government about possible cuts in the number of nurses being trained for the future.

Liberal Democrat Public Health spokesman Jamie Stone said: "We know that the RCN is concerned that a 6m cut to the training budget for nurses will lead to fewer nurses.

"Now we find that their members think that existing nurses are already too busy to provide the standard of care they would wish to.

This is alarming and the Scottish Government needs to sit down with nurses to find a way forward."

The Scottish Government has rejected the claim that the 6m was a cut, insisting the money was from unspent bursaries and would be repaid to central healthcare funds.

Scottish Labour health spokesman Dr Richard Simpson said: "Nicola Sturgeon must listen to what nurses are telling her. We are now seeing the consequences of the SNP's decision to give the NHS its worst spending settlement since devolution."

Case study: There's no time to reassure patients now

CATHERINE has been a nurse working in the NHS in Scotland for the last 20 years.

She says there is no other job she would want to do, but she has seen pressures on staff increase significantly in recent years.

"I have seen attendances go up and also patient expectations are much greater when they come into A&E," she said. Catherine, who works in a hospital in the north of Scotland, said nurses were now expected to carry out more aspects of care than they did in the past.

"I would like to spend more time reassuring patients, especially in a situation like A&E when they may be very worried. I would like to sit with them and hold their hand, but we just don't have the time to do that."

*Catherine is not her real name