Promoting A Positive Workplace

The link between unsafe staffing levels and patient safety? How about patient safety and staff well-being? Sophie Picton explains the connection and simple steps to best retain staff too.

Introduction

Hi guys.

I'm here to talk to you today about safe staffing levels in nursing and how we can promote good patient care and improve staff wellbeing and staff retention.

I hope you guys can pick up something from my video and take it back to your environment, in order to promote well-being and staff retention.

We want our new starters to come back, and we want to promote a culture that's welcoming, approachable, and caring.

So just to give you a bit of background about me.

I've worked as a Nurse for seven years in a variety of different settings, from the community to hospitals, and now currently working as a substance misuse practitioner in a prison.

Direct Impact Of Unsafe Staffing Levels

There's a few things that I've picked up along the way when I've dealt with safe staffing, unsafe staffing levels in the workplace.

The first one being that when the levels are unsafe, and patient care is compromised, staff well-being is compromised.

We must report it.

Where To Report Your Concerns

We can do that in the form of a Datix.

We can report it to our line manager or anyone that is senior to ourselves.

Because ultimately, if the right people are not aware that things are unsafe, nothing will ever change.

How To Prioritise Care

The second thing is prioritising care.

Now this is very important.

We must prioritise the most important care first, and we can split that into categories of low, medium, and high priority.

And it's thinking about our staff and our skill mix.

Competency For The Job

Who has the best skills, confidence, to undertake those tasks.

For example, an agency worker who's not been to our environment before, a student nurse who's in her first year, or a new starter, or someone who just isn't competent with a task, we would always make sure that they were supported, and they felt valued, and they felt like they could approach more senior members of staff when they needed us.

Considerations For Staff Retention

We would never send them to do a task they were not competent to do, because ultimately we want to retain staff.

We want our new starters to come back, and we want to promote a culture that's welcoming, approachable, and caring.

Accountability For Our Well-Being

When staff levels are unsafe, and patient care is compromised, staff well-being is compromised too.

So as well as that, we need to be accountable for ourselves, and making sure we get the support that we need in order to reduce sickness absence.

And sometimes that's inevitable.

We get burnt out.

So when we are absent, and we need a return to work interview, it's making sure we get that, we get that support, we get those referrals that we might need to Occupational Health or the Well-being Service, because that service is there for you to make you feel supported.

So it's making sure you get that dedicated confidential time with your manager or whoever it is that does your return to work interviews to make sure you're supported.

It's also about making sure you get your rest days, and making sure that you're not finishing in the early hours of the morning and then you're starting your shift again at eight o'clock in the morning when you've only had five hours rest because that's not safe.

Impacting Patient Safety

And that's how we make errors, and that's how we put our patients at risks. So making sure we're accountable for that.

A lot of people think that it's the Band 5, the Band 6, the Band 7's role to look after our staff, but it's not.

It's Your Responsiblity

Don't be the ward that no one wants to go back to, or the community setting that everybody wants to avoid.

It's everybody's responsibility to make our staff feel welcome because that's the only time, the only way they're gonna wanna come back is if everybody is nice to them, they feel supported, they feel recognised, and members of the team are approachable when they have questions.

So guys, I hope you've picked up something from my video that you can take back to the workplace in order to improve patient care, patient safety, and staff well-being because ultimately, this will improve staff retention.

Promoting A Positive Workplace

Don't be the ward that no one wants to go back to, or the community setting that everybody wants to avoid.

Be the place that everybody says, "Yeah, I wanna go back there, because the staff were kind and the work was difficult, but I want to go back there because I felt supported."

Thank you guys.

Take care.