The Welsh Conservatives are supporting a petition in a Senedd debate today to expand safe and effective nursing care levels to cover mental health inpatient wards and community nursing.
The petition, sparked by a campaign by the Royal College of Nursing and has secured over 10,500 signatures, asks for the duty for a safe staffing level for nursing for medical and surgical inpatient wards in hospitals, enshrined in Welsh law, extended to cover more areas of healthcare.
Commenting, Welsh Conservative and Shadow Health Minister Russell George MS said:
“The Welsh Conservatives are very pleased to be supporting this campaign for safe staffing levels to extended to more nurses – especially when we consider how understaffed our NHS is.
“In Labour-run Wales, there is a shortage of NHS staff across the board – all contributing to increased dangers to patient safety and rock-bottom staff morale.
“Expanding safe staffing into mental health is particularly important given those departments have lost so many beds under the Labour Government.
“I look forward to further engagement with the RCN and the petitioners, and hope Mark Drakeford does the same, focussing on the cost-of-pain crisis rather than imposing the dreaded tourism tax and 36 more unwanted politicians in Cardiff Bay.”
A few of the key findings of the report are as follows:
- In 2022, NHS Wales has 2,900.41 registered nurse vacancies – this has risen from 1,719 in 2021.
- NHS Wales spent £133.4m on nursing and midwifery agency in 2021/2022. This was an increase of 41% compared to the previous year.
- Every week nurses give the NHS an additional 67,780 hours a week, equivalent of 1,807 full-time nurses.
- In the last ten years the percentage of nursing staff that feel enthusiastic about their job has dropped by 19%. Those that feel they are too busy to provide the level of care they would like has increased by 9%.
- In 2021, there was only 1,323 registered nursing staff employed in social care (based on 72% commissioned services and 100% local authority). In 2021, 319 registered nursing staff left social care, and only 204 joined. This is a deficit of 115. To add to this at the time of gathering data there were 129 ‘live’ vacancies.
Research shows that where there are fewer nurses, patients are 26% more likely to die overall rising to 29% following complicated hospital stays. According to the RCN, staff shortages in Wales mean that nurses need to work 34,284 hours of overtime every week to care for patients.
The campaigns calls for the Labour Government to extend Section 25B of the Nurse Staffing Levels Act 2016, which requires health boards and NHS trusts in Wales to take all reasonable steps to maintain a specified nurse staffing level.
The nurse staffing level is the number and skill mix of nurses required to provide sensitive patient care. In addition, health boards and trusts are required to inform the public of the levels of nursing staff on any ward covered by Section 25B.
When the law was first passed, Section 25B only applied to acute adult medical and surgical wards. On 1 October 2021, it was extended to children’s wards. Petitioners want it to apply in all settings where nursing care is provided, starting with community nursing and mental health inpatient wards.