PM reveals plans for nursing care

The push will see nurses spending more time on frontline care in wards and other services, a senior ward nurse with whom the buck stops, patients leading on inspections and a new ‘friends and family test’ to show whether nurses and patients had a good overall experience, or would want loved ones needing care to be treated at each hospital. Prime Minister David Cameron said: “We know the vast majority of patients are very happy with the care provided by the NHS and I’ve seen the NHS at its very best. But we have heard recently that in some hospitals patients are not provided with the level care or respect they deserve and I am absolutely appalled by this. “If we want dignity and respect, we need to focus on nurses and the care they deliver. The whole approach to caring in this country needs to be reset. Caring for patients is what nurses do. Everything else comes second.” Rolling out the NHS Institute’s ‘Time to Care’ initiative aims to free nurses from nonessential paperwork and ‘excessive bureaucracy’, that add little or no value to patients. This has already helped staff in more than half of acute Trusts to spend extra time with patients. A ‘redtape challenge’ will also be introduced to identify barriers to preventing nurses from doing their job properly and remove them. Nurses are to undertake regular nursing rounds, with patients checked every hour. There will also be a new incentive for hospitals to report results on the ‘NHS Safety Thermometer’ to track four key standards of safety and nursing quality – pressure ulcers, falls, blood clots and catheteracquired urinary tract infections. A new Nursing Quality Forum will look at how the best nursing practice can be spread throughout the NHS and how nursing leadership on hospital wards can be strengthened. In addition, a new patient-led inspection regime will be established, covering food, privacy, cleanliness and dignity. The results of these inspections will be publicly reported, to help drive up standards of care. Results of patient feedback on their experience of care will also be published, and a new indicator will be introduced to all future national patient surveys, asking patients about their experience of care. Dr Peter Carter, chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing, commented: “Nurses working in every field have one thing in common – they chose the profession because they want to care for people. The profession will welcome the moves to free up nurses to put care first, and to focus all their energies on the needs of their patients. In particular, nurses themselves have emphasised the enormous burden of the paperwork they have to complete, day in and day out. An RCN survey found that UK nurses spend more than a million hours a week on paperwork – time taken away from giving patients the best possible care. “Reducing this burden will be very widely welcomed, as will the commitment to empowering the ward sister. Ward sisters are experienced nurses who can provide expert leadership to the team – they need to be able to call the shots and supervise and develop the wider workforce. It is also right that patients and staff are asked for their views and recommendations – as is already happening in some high performing NHS Trusts."