Nursing crisis won’t be fixed without legislation

The Health and Social Care Select Committee has been informed that the current nurse staffing crisis in England won’t be fixed without legislation.

Dame Donna Kinnair, chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing, said that legislation is needed to address the shortage of nursing staff in England and ensure patient safety, with the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care deserving of explicit powers for the health care workforce across England.

Providing evidence as part of the consultation being run by NHS England and NHS Improvement on legislative changes needed to deliver the aims of the NHS Long Term Plan, the RCN stressed that the workforce crisis has developed because there is a lack of clarity about who is responsible for growing and developing the workforce to care for the number of patients there are. To achieve safe staffing, the right professionals are needed, with the right skills, in the right place, at the right time.

Kinnair said: “The lack of accountability has put us back years. Successive Secretaries of State have taken decisions which mean we cannot deliver the NHS Long Term Plan. There needs to be an explicit accountability for the workforce with the Secretary of State. There can be no delivery of the Long Term Plan without investment in the workforce. We cannot go on with the same number of nurses, just moving them around, and feel we can deliver a safe, quality NHS. This is why we need a commitment to accountability for the workforce.”