TEMPORARY Hospital staff were sent from hotel room to hotel room this summer as the Health Department faced an unprecedented shortage of keyworker beds, the Island’s chief nurse has admitted.
Rose Naylor said ‘for the first time ever’ they had struggled to accommodate temporary staff.
She added: ‘We’ve had staff that we’ve had to put in a hotel where we’ve had to move them throughout the course of their time here because the hotel has got holiday bookings.’
Health and Community Services currently has 130 vacant registered nursing posts and eight vacant midwife posts, with 86 agency nurses engaged to help meet the shortfall.
A total of 690 registered nurses and 70 registered midwives are currently employed by HCS.
Ms Naylor said that some posts in the department, filled after extensive recruitment processes, had then been left vacant when the successful candidate pulled out after discovering the cost of accommodation.
Describing temporary accommodation as ‘a challenge in a way it’s never been before’, she said that new schemes being introduced by the government – including provision of 53 flats at Westaway Court – would ease the crisis, particularly for the first quarter of 2023.
But she warned that current recruitment challenges would be increased by the decision to move to away from a single-site solution for the new General Hospital.
‘It’s easy to say that if you have a single-site option your workforce demands are lower and, if you start breaking that up, you need more people. More people will be needed to run it, whether it’s two sites, three sites, four, or whatever
it looks like. It’s a shame about the original scheme which, for the reasons that our government have decided, can’t go ahead but having people on a single site would have made a huge difference to the workforce.
‘The quality of care will be as good as it is today… but it will be a challenge staffing it across different sites. It stands to reason that it will need more people,’ she said.
The chief nurse was commenting on current challenges following publication earlier this week of a patient survey commissioned by the Jersey Care Commission which found that a substantial majority expressed satisfaction at their care provided by Health and Community Services.
She described the results as ‘fantastic for many reasons’, and added: ‘We recognise that we don’t get it right for everybody and we don’t get it right all the time but the majority of the patients that come through the door are very pleased with the services they receive.
‘What these results give us is confidence from people who use those services, and everybody has their own personal experience when they come into care.
‘For anybody now coming into hospital, whichever part of the service they’re coming into, they can draw confidence from people who have been in before. Jersey needs to understand what a fantastic result this is,’ she said.
