Copyright channel4
The Health Secretary Wes Streeting today told Channel 4 News that he will “look at” publishing crucial nurse staffing data uncovered by a major FactCheck investigation, NurseCheck. After a ten-month battle with NHS England, FactCheck obtained over 100,000 secret NHS files that show the true extent of nursing shortages nationwide. These files use the “nurse fill rate” metric to compare the number of nurses that hospitals planned for with the number who were actually on shift across England. Our analysis of these files revealed that a third of acute hospitals were short at least one in ten of the nurses they planned to have on wards – a level of staffing which experts believe to be a cause for concern, and raise the risk of patient harm or death. We found particular gaps in neo-natal, maternity and critical care units. (You can find out how many nurses are missing from your local hospital wards here.) This data used to be routinely published following the Francis reports into the Mid Staffordshire scandal. Those reports highlighted nurse understaffing as a contributing factor in the tragedy. Conservative MP Jeremy Hunt told Channel 4 News in March that getting this information out to the public was one of his major battles as health secretary. But in 2018, under his Conservative successor, the NHS stopped publishing the statistics, even as it continued to collect them internally. Putting the findings of Channel 4 News’ latest investigation into maternity failings at one of Britain’s biggest hospitals, Cathy Newman asked Health Secretary Wes Streeting today if he would look at routinely publishing nurse and midwife fill rate data once again. In response, he said: “I don’t know why you had to wring that data out of government, so let me go away and look at that […] I don’t see why you should have to struggle to access that data, so let me look at how we deal with that.” This is another positive signal that the government will consider resuming publication of this crucial patient safety dataset. Following our investigation earlier this year, Prime Minister Keir Starmer was asked if the government would resume publishing the data. At the time, he replied that there were “no options off the table”. Former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt told us earlier in the year that the figures should “absolutely” be routinely published, and further added that “one of the big battles I fought as Health Secretary was to get these numbers published”. We asked the government if it could provide a more specific commitment or timeframe on the matter, but it was not able to give a response in time for publication.
