No redundancies expected in Future Fit shake-up - health bosses
There will be a ‘small’ reduction in staff at the trust running Shropshire's two main hospitals under the Future Fit plans – but no redundancies are expected, health bosses say.
Victoria Maher, workforce director at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust (SaTH), said there will be a decline in the number of registered nurses under the proposals, but stressed that new roles are also being developed.
Healthcare assistants are being trained to take on a new nurse associate role she said.
There are due to be more than 120 of them at the trust in the next five years.
The nursing associate role is described as a new support role, designed to free up registered nurses to provide more complex clinical care.
Ms Maher said: "Under both options, there is a small reduction in staff numbers, as outlined in the outline business case.
"Over the next five years, we will see huge developments in new technology. This includes moving to electronic patient records, which will have an effect on our workforce needs.
"There will also be fewer staff needed in some areas due to the reduced duplication of services across two sites.
"As we currently have a turnover of around 350 staff each year, we are not expecting these changes to mean anyone will have to be made redundant.
"We aim to deliver the necessary changes in a planned way that will allow us to retain our existing staff and attract new staff, and be able to deliver the best possible care to local people."
She said separating emergency and planned care is expected to create new job opportunities.
She added: "Traditional medical and nursing roles are changing and we need to make sure our workforce is sustainable, so we are creating new roles and working hard to support our teams to grow and develop.
"While our plans show a decrease in registered nurses, they also show an increase in nurse associates.
"This is a new role that will see staff – sourced predominantly from our healthcare assistant workforce – trained to fill what are currently some of our registered nurse roles.
"Our first nurse associates will start at our hospitals this year following a two-year training programme and we plan to grow our nurse associate workforce to over 120 staff over the next five years.
"At the moment, we have more than 120 nursing vacancies, and we’ve lost 17 nursing and midwifery registered staff in the past 12 months.
"This means we have to rely heavily on temporary staff, including agency workers.
"It shows how crucial the new nurse associate role is to helping us make our nursing teams sustainable.
"And, crucially, it also means our staff will benefit from opportunities to grow and develop their careers with us."
Staffing levels at both Royal Shrewsbury Hospital and Telford's Princess Royal Hospital remain an issue and health chiefs hope changes will make it easier to recruit and keep staff.
The Future Fit public consultation, which features two options, will run until September 11.
