Nursing crisis sweeps wards as NHS struggles to find recruits | NHS

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Ministers have been warned of a mounting workforce crisis in England’s hospitals as they struggle to recruit tens of thousands of vacant nursing positions, with one in five nursing positions in some wards now vacant.

Hospital leaders say the nursing shortage has been exacerbated by the collapse in recruits from Europe, including Spain and Italy.

The latest NHS figures reveal that there are around 39,000 vacancies for registered nurses in England, with one in 10 nursing vacancies in acute wards in London and one in five vacancies in mental health wards in the south east.

The number of EEA nurses on the Nursing and Midwifery Council registry has fallen by more than 90%, from 9,389 in the year to 31 March 2016 to 810 in the year to 31 March 2021.

Thousands of nursing shifts cannot be filled each week due to staff shortages, according to hospital safe placement reports seen by the Observer.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson is already under pressure from the post-Brexit UK labor shortage, from truck drivers to farm workers. Health directors’ concerns about the impact on patient care from severe staffing were exposed as experts warned last week that the flu could kill up to 60,000 people this winter.

NHS Trusts are paid by NHS England up to £7,000 per vacancy to try to recruit nurses from foreign countries including India and the Philippines.

Patricia Marques, Director of the Royal College of Nursing England said: “There are not enough staff to provide the required care and we now have a crisis in the nursing workforce. We have never had to get to a situation where we have been so dependent on international nurses. We are on a knife edge. “.

Hospital trusts struggling to fill nursing positions include:

The University of North Midlands NHS Trust – which operates the Royal Stoke University Hospital and Stafford County Hospital – reported to its board of directors 401 nursing vacancies, with a vacancy rate of 12%. The fund temporarily suspended non-emergency operations last month due to high demand and staff shortages. It is recruiting nurses from abroad, including from India and Ghana.

Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, which reported nearly 700 vacancies for nurses, midwives and practitioners in its operating department, with a vacancy rate of 13%. It postponed 287 operations in July and August and last weekend appealed for nurses to work extra shifts due to a “staff shortage in our critical care departments.”

The NHS is in mid and southern Essex, with a 17% vacancy rate for nurses, one of the highest in the country. It has 2269 full-time clinical and non-clinical vacancies. The trust reported that up to 1,850 patients a month were waiting more than four hours at A&E during the summer due to staff shortages.

A consolidated union survey of 188 critical care staff at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS revealed staff concerns about chronic nursing shortages and risks to patient safety. Nine out of 10 employees reported a shortage of employees in their departments every shift.

“I work in intensive care for patients recovering from surgery and we need up to 11 nurses in this shift, one for each patient,” said Dave Carr, 58, a critical care nurse at St Thomas’ Hospital and a Unite representative. “We regularly only have three or four nurses we have. And we have to borrow nurses from other areas or hire temporary staff. The staff is completely broken. More than 100 nurses have left the trust in the past 10 months.”

Shelley Pierce, 34, an accident and emergency nurse and workplace representative at RCN in southern England, said nurses from Europe were abused by some members of the public after the Brexit referendum. “I can totally understand why some have made the decision to go home because they don’t seem to be wanted,” she said.

The government has pledged to increase the number of NHS nurses by 50,000 by 2025. NHS England announced £28m of funding in September last year to hire nurses from abroad to help pay for accommodation, flights and quarantine. The initial cost of hiring a nurse from abroad is between £10,000 and £12,000.

NHS workers demand appropriate wage increase in July. Photo: Hester Ng/Rex/Shutterstock

By comparison, training a nurse in the UK takes three years and costs anywhere from £50,000 to £70,000. The government does not pay tuition fees, but does provide maintenance grants of at least £5,000 per year.

There is a global shortage of nurses, and so there has been criticism of trusts recruiting from abroad rather than training more UK staff. Even the new Minister of Care and Mental Health, Jillian Keegan, has reportedly called it “incredibly ineffective, wrong and just weird”.

Despite this, a report by the Nuffield Trust think tank, commissioned by the NHS and published last week, said significant outside hiring would be required if the government nursing goal was to be met. Saffron Cordery, executive vice president of NHS Providers, called for an all-cost workforce plan in this month’s review of government spending.

She said: “We’ve had a workforce shortage for many years, and we’ve seen Brexit get worse. The workforce is the driver of any hospital and when you have shifts that haven’t been filled, it’s a huge challenge.”

Danny Mortimer, chief executive of NHS Employers, part of the NHS consortium, said: “We’ve experienced the stress we normally see in the winter months over the summer. Many staff expect this to be one of the toughest winters the NHS has ever faced.”

A survey of more than 1,000 NHS staff by the Health Care Workers Foundation, a charity that supports health service employees, found that 73% had considered leaving in the past year. One in three front-line employees said they were likely to leave next year.

The total number of NHS full-time equivalent vacancies in England rose from 83,203 in June 2020 to 93,806 in June 2021, according to figures from NHS Digital, the government’s health and information centre. During the same period, nursing vacancies increased from 37,760 to 38,952.

Hospital trusts say they hire staff from abroad to help fill jobs. The University of North Midlands Hospitals said it had recently hired nearly 300 additional nurses, including 93 from abroad. The NHS at Leeds Teaching Hospitals said staffing was an “ongoing challenge”, but that it had succeeded in recruiting new staff. The Mid and South Essex NHS Trust said its loopholes were filled by the agency and temporary staff. A spokesperson for the NHS Foundation Trust, Gee and St Thomas’s, confirmed 118 nurses are leaving this year, but said 97 nurses had started and another 30 were undergoing pre-employment checks. A spokesperson for the secretariat said the trust was listening to all concerns raised by staff. The trust said, “The safety of our patients and the well-being of our staff is our top priority. We are investing in hiring more nurses, as well as continuing to provide extensive support to the health and well-being of our staff.”

Health experts say the overall NHS workforce is growing, but not enough to keep up with demand, and the proportion of job vacancies across NHS England has grown over the course of the year.

The NHS said: “The NHS is committed to reducing nursing vacancies, including through international recruitment, and increasing welfare support for existing staff to boost retention.

“The nursing and midwifery workforce has grown more than 2.7% over the past year with more than 330,000 full-time employees providing care, and 80,000 people across the country applying for a nursing course this year.”

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