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Strengthening the role of nursing and midwifery |
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Written by Communications Team
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A consultation with staff begins today at Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals NHS Trust aimed at strengthening the role of nursing within the Trust and investing in front-line nursing staff.
The Trust’s Interim Chief Nurse, Susan Osborne explains: “High quality nursing is key to improving patient care and that means having the right numbers of highly skilled nurses and midwives in the right place at the right time. Earlier this year we decided the time was right to carry out a full review of our nursing structure, and it became clear there were some inequalities in staffing and skills across our clinical areas.
We also realised that we needed to strengthen our nursing and midwifery leadership to give us a stronger focus on clinical issues and to ensure greater engagement with front-line clinical staff. Part of this will be to build on some of the work we did last year to strengthen the role of our Matrons, increasing their focus on quality and patient experience and putting in a better (clinical) management structure to free up more of their time for direct patient care.
This will involve introducing new Heads of Nursing / Midwifery posts, which will be senior nursing roles aligned to our seven clinical divisions and means our Matrons will now be reporting to senior nurses rather than to General Managers. We also want to strengthen the role of our ward sisters, putting them in control of their wards and strengthening their leadership skills. This is all really positive news for our patients and will help to improve clinical outcomes."
Key proposals:
- Strengthening our clinical nursing leadership - Heads of Nursing / Midwifery managing Matrons, Matrons managing Ward Sisters:
- To establish 4 Heads of Nursing and 1 Head of Midwifery aligned with our 7 new clinical divisions – these are senior clinical posts which will be accountable to the Divisional Director (a consultant) with a professional link to the Chief Nurse and will help to drive forward service improvement, strengthen the way we manage clinical risk and safety and improve patient experience.
- The role of the matron is to be further developed with more focus on quality and improving patient experience. Introducing the new Heads of Nursing/Midwifery roles means we will be reducing the overall number of matrons; however, this new clinical management structure means they will have stronger professional accountability and more time for direct patient care.
- The ward sister role will also be strengthened with more clarity around responsibility, accountability and leadership.
- Increasing the number of funded nursing posts
- Ensuring the correct mix of skill and staffing numbers in clinical areas at all times (nurse:patient ratio) and making sure there is a senior nurse present at all times (24 hours/day).
- To increase specialist nursing on the wards our nurse consultants and clinical nurse specialists will undertake rostered clinical shifts to provide additional senior nurse/midwife leadership.
Susan continues: "These improvements will help to ensure our patients get the best possible care on our wards and is in line with national policy to devolve more responsibility for service improvement and accountability to clinical leaders and front-line staff and provide a better career structure for our nurses and midwives. Reducing the number of matrons but putting more professional responsibility into our new Heads of Nursing/Midwifery roles means that overall we will have stronger clinical leadership and support for our nursing staff which is so critical to improving patient care at ward level. As we work to become a Foundation Trust we will, quite rightly, be subject to more rigorous control on quality and safety issues, both through the official regulator Monitor and the Care Quality Commission, and these improvements will help to ensure we meet their stringent criteria."
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