Safe staffing

All hospitals in England publish information about how many nursing staff are working on their wards or inpatient units every month. This includes the percentage of shifts that meet their agreed staffing levels. This forms part of the NHS’ response to the Francis report which said patients and their families needed a lot more information about how hospitals were being managed and run.

The Trust takes the care of the people who use our services very seriously and we already have a number of mechanisms in place to make sure there are enough nurses on our wards and units to ensure they run safely.

What information will we publish?

This page publishes our most up-to-date staffing levels and provides links to papers discussed in public at our Trust Board meetings. Staffing levels from previous months can be found at the bottom of this page.

The Department of Health set a template for trusts to complete and upload to the Unify (an online data portal) website. A full explanation of what this data means is included in a paper which goes to our Trust Board meeting every month, where staffing levels are discussed and if units have been unable to meet planned staffing levels we will look at the reasons why and what actions have been taken.

Other information about staffing on our wards

As patients, visitors and staff enter each of our wards or inpatient units, they are able to see a board that displays the planned and actual numbers of staff working there each day. The boards show who is in charge of the shift and who is on duty. The boards also show what the implications of the staffing levels are, if all activities are taking place on the wards/units or if there have been any changes.