Nurses Call For Law To Regulate Staffing Levels

The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has called for a minimum staffing level in the NHS to be enshrined into law by the next government, saying this will help ensure patient safety. A survey of 11,000 nurses on the last shift they worked suggested that only a third of shifts had enough registered nurses on duty. A third of hospital shifts were missing at least a quarter of the registered nurses they needed, while in the community almost 4 in 10 shifts were missing up to half of the planned number of registered nurses, the survey revealed. The RCN said that nurses sometimes have to oversee dozens of sick and injured people at a time as it called for safety-critical limits on the maximum number of patients a single nurse can be responsible for....