Public Board papers 31.03.22

in the four bedded bays. However, Ward 10 are now able to accommodate their capacity of 28 patients, as all surgical patients are covid tested and isolate prior to admission.

4. Ensuring the correct staff with the correct skills The twice daily nurse staffing meeting continued to take place with the senior ward sisters, matrons, patient flow staff, with the discharge team included as required. In addition, a twice daily sitrep/incident control room meeting led by the Chief Operating Officer and Executive on Call has continued. This meeting is a multi-professional operational meeting focused on the daily management of the organisation. Ward level staffing, patient acuity, required skill mix and any other clinical concerns were reviewed, and immediate actions put into place. The senior nursing and Healthroster team have also collaborated with the Chief Nursing Officer national team to provide and extend expert training with regards to the effective and robust use of the SNCT model. The intention is for this to be used alongside the Safe Care acuity tool to support the daily deployment of nursing staff across the organisation Overall summary • Ward managers with their matrons have reviewed their specific ward budgets and, in some areas, had an increase in their nursing and health care assistant (HCA) establishments, in which they have had an opportunity to review models of working. Therefore, recruitment remains ongoing to ensure the correct skill mix. • All ward managers reported that there have been some challenges ensuring sufficient numbers of registered nurses to meet safe staffing requirements, but no patient safety concerns raised. Processes have been in place with the use of temporary nurses and deployment of staff to ward areas to ensure patient safety. • The implementation of an inpatient initiative has seen the successful recruitment of 12 HCA’s into substantive posts to work flexibly across the inpatient wards. This is to ensure a high standard of quality care, in particular for our patients with additional needs who may require 1:1 supervision and/or enhanced care due to complex needs. It has also contributed to the reduction in the need for temporary staff to provide this important enhanced care. • A number of these HCA‘s have been successful in obtaining posts in a permanent ward or department but remain within the organisation. However due to the success of this initiative there is an ongoing recruitment process to maintain the HCA flexible model of working. • Whilst the changes to bed numbers and ward movements made collecting sufficient and consistent data complex, the wards inpatient wards continue to report a steady staffing ratio of 1:6. • Despite the challenges of the pandemic the inpatient wards continued to achieve reaccreditation of GOLD status in the Trust CODE quality scheme, which has included compliance with two newly introduced standards (end of life care and diabetes management). This meant all the wards have achieved their reaccreditation of GOLD status. However, the annual re-accreditation for ward 12 was postponed for 2-months due to the COVID ‘red-status’ which has delayed the achievement of some CODE quality markers.

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