THREE new roles are being created to in a bid to tackle the shortage in nurses at the Alexandra Hospital in Redditch and Worcestershire Royal.
Each ward is being assessed with a view to employing a ward administrator, housekeeper and assistant nursing practitioners with a view to freeing qualified staff to care for patients.
Currently Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust (WAHT) has 80 nursing vacancies in its medical division and 43 in surgery, positions which are currently being filled by expensive agency staff instead.
However Mari Gay, chief nursing officer told a recent WAHT board meeting that the new jobs offered a different way to provide safe staffing levels.
“This will take qualified staff away from administrative roles and the hope is that these new jobs will be filled by local people and that way we will be able to retain them in our workforce,” she said.
Board members acknowledged that anxieties over the future of the Alex had damaged staff moral but that two recent recruitment fairs had been highly successful.
“We are getting more interest in the Alex, not enough, but with what we’ve put in place we should get a more sustainable situation.”
The trust is also running a ‘Big Conversation’ initiative in an effort to understand what is driving staff to move on.
At the end of 2015 the number of full time qualified nurses working for the trust, which runs the Worcestershire Royal Hospital in Worcester, the Alexandra Hospital in Redditch and Kidderminister Hospital, was 49 less than at the start of the year.
Reasons for quitting given by staff include work-life balance, relocation, better reward package and promotion, although it was recognised that the transfer of maternity and gynaecology services to Worcester from Redditch may also have had an impact.
