- Conference
- 2011 Health Care Service Group Conference
- Date
- 2 December 2010
- Decision
- Carried
In a bid to save money, many health boards are focusing on the nursing wages bill and are using unsustainable tactics, such as freezing posts, not replacing registered nurses when they leave or retire and converting vacant registered nurse posts to a lower grade as they cost less.
Despite all of the repeated assurances, from both the political system and senior health service management, frontline posts have not been protected and have been specifically targeted for curtailment and cutbacks. Health service management’s current approach to managing their budgets is to specifically cut back on frontline posts, including temporary nurses.
Many health boards are choosing not to replace like with like – and when nurses retire -are using skill mix to make adjustments. This is primarily driven not by quality but for economic reasons.
Whilst not opposed to skill mix review, which can be an effective way of ensuring that organisations have the right staff with the right skills in the correct areas, the nursing workforce is ageing and we are losing the skills and experience of older nurses who are retiring. If we do not replace them with new registered nurses this could have devastating consequences for the future of patient care.
Conference therefore calls upon the Service Group Executive to campaign and lobby to ensure that the NHS continues to educate, and retain sufficient numbers of nurses and midwives, recognising that this will be necessary to develop the type of nurse-led services which will be needed in the future to reform our health service, increase its productivity – while maintaining high quality, safe care to patients.