Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust — House of Commons, 2016-07-21
Topic: Health
Yvette Cooper (Labour, Centre-left): My hon. Friend is exactly right. We hear continually from constituents often saying the same thing: the nursing staff are wonderful, look after them and work immensely hard, but are overstretched; there are simply not enough of them to do the job they want to do The trust has recruited not just locally but from across Europe and India, which has sometimes raised language issues. It is looking at new ways to recruit from the local area, and in some areas, the number of vacancies has fallen. It has also put in place processes to switch staff around to make sure that gaps are filled every day. I welcome the commitment by the chief nursing officer and the chief executive to do everything they can to fill the staffing gaps, but it is still not enough We agreed with the trust that the Fanshawes and the local health watch should be able to do an unannounced visit to ward 43, talk to parents and report on what they found. I quote from their report: "Patients... reported kindness and very good care. Patients generally agreed that staff are lovely but are ‘run off their feet’" They found that staffing levels were better than last year, "but it is still often a struggle and only rarely does the ward have the right quota of staff" Just this week, I received another email from another family with a relative in ward 43 raising serious alarms about the level of staffing on the ward and the level of care that their relative was being given. There were not enough healthcare assistants or nurses to provide the basic care and support needed. That fits with the findings last year of the Care Quality Commission, which also raised concerns about safe staffing levels. Once again, we cannot pay sufficient tribute to the kindness and hard work of the staff at the trust. However, when they are stretched in all different directions, it is in the end the patients who lose out and the staff who are deeply concerned because they are not able to provide the level of care that they want I am concerned, too, about the financial pressures on the Mid Yorkshire trust. It is not the only trust where the money received is simply not enough to meet rising demand. I suspect that the Minister will have been briefed on some of the financial pressures and the squeeze facing the Mid Yorkshire trust. There is a risk of services being cut not for sensible medical reasons, but simply because it does not have the funding or the staffing to provide them safely It is even worse than that. Even where the Mid Yorkshire trust has budgeted for the staff, it cannot recruit or retain enough to deliver the services in the way it wants and the way our communities need. The latest figures from the trust list 150 nursing vacancies: that includes healthcare assistants and safety support workers, and amounts to about 12% of budgeted posts. The vacancy rate for nursing staff in the theatre department is 17%, and it is 20% in intermediate care. If we take account of holidays, maternity leave, sick leave, stress, and temporary secondments to other departments, the gaps are bigger. Monitoring by department in May, which looked at the actual staffing relative to the planned levels wanted, showed cardiology at only 76%, stroke rehab at 65% and short stay at 70% The trust also measured unavailability, which encompasses the percentage of contracted hours lost owing to staff absence, including for sickness and stress. When some staff are working so hard, and some are also being moved around from one department to another in order to cope with gaps elsewhere, facing further stress and uncertainty, it leads to higher levels of absence.