I recently attended the Royal Wolverhampton Trust September Board Meeting – The Royal Wolverhampton Trust runs New Cross Hospital and other facilities across the City. I have only been observing these board meetings since early Summer. I have been surprised at how staff size is so large. The RWT is indeed a big employer for the City and Sub region.
The Board report informed that RWT currently employs 7,047 people. In the Report they inform that the average days lost by staff to sickness in the last twelve months was 9.5%.
Staff turnover remains high 12.09% but below the Trust total that it set itself which is 13.2% and is above the average rate for similar establishments across the Country which is 8.99%
The average working days lost per individual due to sickness is 9.5 days. The Trust point out that this is similar to the City Councils statistic which they quote as 9 average days.
Interestingly the Hospital Board state that RWT employees average days lost compare to
- Public Sector 7.9 days
- Private Sector 5.5 days
- Manufacturing & Production 6.2days
- Not for Profit Sector 5.4days
These sort of statistics obviously feed through to the everyday working of the hospital and the other ancillary medical areas that are serving the public. The good news in this months board report suggests that the 25 operations that were cancelled in August was a significant improvement on the same month last year.
40% of the cancellation figure for operations in August was because of the loss of theatre time.
- Interestingly the number of trained nurses in the establishments are 2,344 or 71.35%
- Untrained Nurses employed stands at 941 or 28.65%
The Chief Executive in his general comments during the meeting referred to the fact that the hospital needed more Nurses, he also commented on the resources and the difficulty that the Trust was having in ensuring the facilities were operated efficiently.
He said that resources were becoming a problem, and that “Politicians should be honest.” He explained that some patients required one to one nursing care, but the Trust doesn’t have that sort of resource. He said that the Health Service had been given £8billion in extra resource in this years budget. But it needed £22billion!
He informed the Board that the NHS needs more staff if it is going to continue to do what it is being expected to do. If the Resources are not forthcoming then the Politicians need to tell us “what we are NOT going to continue to be doing, that we are doing now”. He went onto say that the Trust’s doing all that it can, but the Trust needs an extra three million pounds to be spent on Nursing.
He also said that there was 15% of NHS Directors jobs lying vacant across the service nationally, the reason being that people just do not want the jobs.
CQC overall assessment of the Royal Hospital Trust was judged to be Requiring Improvement.