Caring for patients
Caring for patients is at the heart of clinical nursing care, and our staff tell us that they gain the most job satisfaction when they feel that they do this well to achieve the best patient care outcomes. Many things contribute to our goal of excellent patient care.
1. Workload and workforce planning
We plan to continue to ensure that we have the right staff with the right skills in the right place to achieve excellent nursing care. The Nursing Department Workforce Planning Group oversee this area of work and ensure that we monitor skill mix, nursing staff demographics, turnover, implementation of Roster Policy and planning for implementation of electronic roster (in line with wider NHS Scotland plans).
We have responsibilities to implement the Health and Care Staffing (Scotland) Act (2019) and are working with multi-disciplinary colleagues in order to achieve this. This includes reviewing our escalation procedures, monitoring use of supplementary staffing and implementation of staff education around workload and workforce planning. We will work closely with Allied Healthcare Professionals and Medicine to report on workforce planning activity to the Board as per the expectations of the legislation.
Action 2.1
We will continue to apply the Common Staffing Method and increase the opportunities for scrutiny of this data and knowledge around this data to ensure safe and effective patient care and staffing.
2. Nursing and Midwifery Code of Conduct
The NMC code of conduct underpins nurses’ values and attributes to be person centred in the care of patients. Our registrants are expected to exercise professional judgement and are accountable for their practice.
Action 2.2
We ensure compliance with nursing revalidation. We are working closely with our pharmacy team to ensure safe, effective person centred use of medicines.
3. Embedding new technologies and digitalisation
We are working closely with the e-Health team to help to implement new technologies including the development of Electronic Patient Records (EPR) and other clinical systems to enhance release of nursing time to care. The new EPR will help with nursing documentation and recording of care interventions.
Action 2.3
We will continue to support our staff to embrace the opportunities offered by advancing medical technologies. We will contribute to the development and implementation of new hospital electronic prescribing and medicines administration system.
