NHS staff feel "overstretched"

27 Mar 2009

A Healthcare Commission poll of 160,000 NHS workers in England found that nearly half of them feel overstretched at work.

There are now more NHS staff than ever but 47% of those polled said that there were not enough people to “do the job properly”.

The poll also found that 31% of staff did not feel valued by their NHS Trust and 35% of staff had witnessed an incident in the last month “that could have hurt staff or patients”. Half of ambulance staff reported that their vehicles were not kept in a good state of repair.

The chief executive of the Healthcare Commission, Anna Walker, said: “There are real lessons to be learned from this survey about leadership, management and team work.”

The survey showed growth in the number of staff in almost all areas, particularly in the number of school nurses, modern matrons, GPs, community matrons, physiotherapists and radiographers.

Ann Keen, the Health Minister, said: “The NHS workforce is now at record levels and has increased by almost 300,000 over the last ten years.”

Guy Forster, a medical law expert, said: "This is not the first time concerns have been raised about insufficient staffing levels.  Inevitably, as with all aspects of the public sector, there will be issues regarding the availability of resources but it is simply unacceptable for patient safety to be compromised in this way."

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