Great Western Hospitals Foundation Trust is still finding it difficult to recruit enough nurses. Its November board meeting was told that across all its contracts, services, wards and including Wiltshire’s community health services, it is short of 151 nurses.
One area of shortage is in paediatric nurses. During a recruitment visit to Italy GWH has just succeeded in signing up eight recently qualified paediatric nurses. And a recruitment day at the Swindon hospital found one qualified paediatric nurse and two more who were about to qualify.
Six more children’s nurses are needed – especially for its recently opened paediatric emergency department.
In another development announced at the meeting, GWH’s board has decided not to bid to retain the hospital’s contact for Wiltshire’s Children services. GWH has held this contract since 2011, it ends in December 2015 and is currently being put out to tender by Wiltshire Clinical Commissioning Group.
The board, Chief Executive Nerissa Vaughan explained, want to focus on “building adult community healthcare services across Wiltshire, bringing care close to home, joining up services and keeping people well. This is because as a Trust this is where we can make the greatest contribution to improving healthcare.”
She added: “We are extremely proud of the service we have delivered to local children, young people and their families over the past few years and there have been some great improvements to the care and support these, often vulnerable, children and young people receive.”
“This is a strong service which will be well placed with a new provider to develop even further.”
However, GWH has recently been commissioned by NHS England to deliver the Family Nurse Partnership scheme across Wiltshire. This is a new scheme to give first-time teenage mums and their babies targeted support from early pregnancy until their child is two years old.
The scheme’s family nurses will show new mums how to have a healthy pregnancy, prepare for labour and support their baby’s learning and development. They will also work with mums to ensure they get the right health and emotional care for themselves and their baby.
GWH is still forecasting that it will have a deficit at the end of the financial year of £2.m. The Trusts finances are currently being investigated by the regulator Monitor. High on their agenda will be GWH’s annual Private Finance Initiative payments for the Swindon hospital – and for Savernake Hospital which GWH now owns.
One of the key elements of NHS hospital overspends at present is the amount being spent on agency staff – especially nursing staff. So the current 151 shortfall in nursing staff will certainly not be helping to reduce the scale of this deficit.
Taking one example of the pressures GWH is under, attendances at the Emergency department (ED – also known as A&E) are up on 2013-2014 and above the numbers planned for.
At October the year-to-date (YTD) attendance figure for the ED in 2013-2014 was 45,507. The planned YTD attendances for the current year was set at 44,360 – taking into account the Wiltshire CCG’s efforts to treat more people closer to home and reduce attendances at EDs. However, the YTD figure up to October this year is 47,221 – and there is still the winter period to come.