Views from the front line: is the NHS workforce at crisis point?

摘要

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) hospital inspection regime includes assessments of safe staffing. During each hospital inspection, specialist CQC advisers collect data from a variety of sources, including workforce rosters, to ensure :hat individual core services have the right skill mix and sufficient staff at the appropriate grades to deliver optimum patient care. For example, when CQC inspectors are reviewing hospital services for children and young people, they compare the unit under inspection with national staffing standards developed by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) to define staffing levels for children and young people's services, and benchmarks from the children's National Service Framework, to ascertain if there are sufficient numbers of trained children's nurses and play specialists on duty at any one time (Department of Health (DH), 2004; RCN, 2013). Similarly, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) and the British Association of Perinatal Medicine (BAPM) have developed medical staffing standards that CQC inspectors use to determine if children's units and neonatal units have sufficient doctors on duty (BAPM, 2010; RCPCH, 2015). Although many children's services in England's hospitals do meet these standards, some struggle to do so. The situation in other core medical services is-oftentnueh worse, with an over-reliance on bank or agency staff.