Sandwell Hospital crisis as nurses quit piling on pressure for busy winter
Sandwell Hospital is struggling to hold onto nurses as bosses admitted they were concerned by the numbers quitting their roles.
Health chiefs were forced to make an 'immediate intervention' by bringing in more agency workers as 17 band five nurses left Sandwell's NHS trust in September.
Another 12 went the following month, with leaders admitting they had witnessed an 'increasing trend' of nurses moving elsewhere.
Since April, 11 nurses have left every month on average.
Express & Star Comment: Crisis calls for special measures
The staffing situation has piled more pressure on the hospital in the run-up to Christmas as they seek to avoid a winter crisis.
Its A&E waiting times performance has plummeted since September.
The loss of key staff on the wards has forced hospital bosses to bring in more temporary workers in order to bolster the workforce.
Chiefs at the Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust have made no secret of their desire to decrease their reliance on agency staff.
As well as staffing shortages, regularly having to replace nurses is costing the trust that runs the hospital tens of thousands of pounds.
It costs £32,500 to replace each band five nurse that leaves, a trust board report revealed, when bringing in cover, advertising roles and training are factored in.
The report said: "While we are performing better than most trusts in our region and nationally there appears to be an increasing trend of leavers over the past few months which requires our immediate intervention. This peaked at 17 nurses leaving in September 2017."
Elaine Newell, Chief Nurse at Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “Over the past year we have successfully given out 202 conditional job offers to nurses through a number of events.
“Following on from this hard work, our key priority will be to ensure that nursing staff remain at our trust, with a retention plan to decrease our turnover rate to 10.7 per cent by March 2018.
“We are doing this by implementing a number of new initiatives. This includes investing in our new Personal Development Review (PDR) process that focuses on the developmental needs of the individual staff member, giving our employees the opportunity to grow and develop within our organisation."
Patients have faced longer waits in A&E at Sandwell General and City Hospital over the last three months.
Just 83 per cent of patients were seen within four hours in November, way below the 95 per cent national NHS target.
