It has been the case for a sadly extended period of time that frontline nurses are under intense pressure to maintain a high standard of care with fewer resources, more red tape and stricter targets. There are now a plethora of different forms that need completing, distributing and filing for even the most basic request. The nurses we’ve spoken to recently are naturally concerned about their increasing workload and decreasing one-to-one patient time.
We spoke to a cancer community nurse who felt that part of a typical day is not enough hours to care for all the patients. Despite a constantly changing workload however, she still felt a sense a reward for ensuring a patient was well cared for that day.
Many nurses feel a strong sense of commitment to care, particularly in the face of challenging circumstances and that’s what makes them great nurses, but it shouldn’t have to be that way. We spoke to a nurse specialist who said,
I think nurses still care very much about the quality of treatment and the care they give to their patients, but the way some managers run their departments makes this difficult and stressful. Managers say that the patient must come first but are also under pressure to meet bed occupancy and discharge targets, which is not always in the patient’s best interest.
So it would appear that targets can be detrimental to a patient’s recovery, and nurses can often be subject to the manger’s need to meet a target rather than patient’s need to recover more fully before being discharged. However, there are some areas of nursing where targets have demonstably improved patient care. An experienced A&E nurse tells us that targets have vastly reduced patient waiting times,
Patients now have more choice and waiting times have dramatically reduced. When I started my career in A&E patients would wait on trolleys for over 24 hours in corridors. This is now not seen as acceptable.
Part of the Conservative election manifesto was to empower nurses and frontline healthcare workers and give them more freedom to manage patient care, and so far David Cameron has continued to persue this by announcing that a third of all NHS bureaucracy will be cut and all politically motivated targets will be removed. Only time will tell of course, but it could work out that nurses get back the responsibility to fully manage their patients and work under less pressure of targets.
