Three damning reports have emerged in the last week alone, all with the all-too-familiar theme of nurses either feeling stressed or with poor mental health at their core.
One, from the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), detailed a workforce report indicating that pressures within the NHS are so extreme that every one of the health service’s 350,000 nurses in England took the equivalent of a week off work last year because of stress-related illness.
Another highlighted the fact nurses are feeling increasingly stressed by having to treat patients on trolleys, with patients sometimes left for more than five days on hospital trolleys in emergency departments, according to data collected via a Freedom of Information request by the Liberal Democrats.
To complete the tripartite of unwelcome – but not altogether unsurprising – news, we learned from a YouGov survey that three out of four NHS staff have experienced poor mental health in the past year, largely due to exhaustion.
In short, to borrow a phrase from RCN general secretary and chief executive Pat Cullen, nursing staff are running on empty.
In reference to patients being treated on trolleys, professor Nicola Ranger, RCN chief nursing officer and deputy chief executive, states the “unsafe and undignified” situation is becoming normalised across hospitals. I would argue so too is the expectation that nursing and prolonged stress go hand-in-hand. Neither should be the case, nor should it be tolerated. Nurse leaders and influencers must do all within their power to ensure such circumstances do not become an accepted norm which nurses should tolerate.
Is it any wonder then that only one in four nurses would recommend working for the NHS to others, with – you’ve guessed it – poor pay and ever-demanding workloads to blame for the poor job reference.
It’s hardly a glowing endorsement to attract new recruits, and it’s little wonder applications to study nursing across the UK in 2023-24 fell by almost 20%.
If the government is to attract and retain desperately needed nurses, it needs to act – and act fast – to stop the endless cycle of staff shortages, ever-increasing work demands and pressure, poor pay, insufficient bed provision, low staff-to-patient ratios, fragmented services; the list, sadly, goes on and on.
Funding for mental health hubs for frontline NHS workers, originally set up in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, has been gradually scaled back from a peak of £38.5m in 2020-21 to £2.3m in 2023-24, and has now ceased entirely. Why? Have all these pressing issues been addressed? Do we have a happy and healthy nursing workforce? Is patient care and provision as good as it should be?
The answer is obviously no, so it’s not exactly action which suggests workforce welfare is at the heart of government thinking.
Work-life balance, rather than retirement, is also being cited as a growing reason for nurses quitting the NHS. With that in mind, employers might want to consider a recent research study suggesting employers should focus less on a one-size-fits-all approach to working terms. Instead, the study published in the journal BMJ Open said, contracts tailored to age and working hours were key to boosting staff retention.
Anything to ease the unbearable pressure placed on the nursing workforce must be considered. Let’s start filling those depleted tanks with firm actions and optimism.
Denise Eaton is senior clinical editor, Nursing Times