Acute Medical Staffing – West Cumberland Hospital
Acute
The West Cumberland Hospital (WCH) of North Cumbria University Hospitals NHS Trust has been struggling with issues regarding the recruitment and retention of acute Medical Registrars for a number of years. This has led to a situation where all the out of hours acute medical senior decision maker cover has been provided using premium pay staff.
The Challenge
- The Urgent and Pro-active Care work streams decided to address this unique challenge by looking to develop the senior decision maker capability using Advanced Nurse Practitioners. The trust engaged the WRaPT team to help quantify the number of staff required to deliver this service.
Our Approach
The WRaPT team engaged with the service leads at WCH to understand the requirements for the new roles and underlying changes to the service.
Workforce data for the teams was collated and then uploaded into WRaPT
The WRaPT team then assigned the appropriate activity metric to the workforce. In this case hours of care. Modelling was performed taking into account the training requirements of these new members of staff.
The Outcome
-
- WRaPT demonstrated that the use of ANPs was required to provide a sustainable long term solution to delivering the capability of a senior decision maker for out of hours care in lieu of the Medical Registrar.
- WRaPT showed that the ANP model would deliver savings of circa £1.5m compared with using premium pay staff.
- WRaPT provided evidence of a 40% increase in the number of staff that would be required in order to ensure that ANPs receive sufficient in hours supervision to maintain their skills. This would still be more cost-effective than premium pay staff. It would also provide the opportunity for staff to enhance their skills and potentially work in other areas of the hospital including A&E and maybe Intensive Care
The results of the work formed part of the submission to the pre-consultation business case.
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