Walsall Manor Hospital bosses bid to recruit 150 nurses

Bosses at Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust which runs the hospital have said they hope more people will want to work for the trust now that England's Chief Inspector of Hospitals has said that it can exit special measures.

The trust's chief executive Richard Beeken said: "Being in special measures has led to recruitment problems in other jobs I've worked at."

Director of nursing Karen Dunderdale added: "From a nursing perspective we've got the lowest vacancy rating we've had since I've been director of nursing in the last 12 months.

"I have seen also seen a reduction in short term sickness of our staff.

"We need about 150 nursing staff.

Reversed

"I think in the past staff have chosen to go and work somewhere else or they've stayed for a short time and moved on but that has reversed."

The health bosses also said they hope to be rated outstanding by a Government watchdog by 2022.

Inspectors found that progress had been made since the last inspection but there were still some issues for the trust to address, particularly in surgery and critical care.

As a result, the trust is rated 'requires improvement' overall, the same as after an inspection in 2017.

In addition to its overall rating, the trust was rated 'requires improvement' for whether its services are safe, effective, responsive and well-led. It is rated 'outstanding' for being caring.

Confidence

Mr Beeken said: "I was delighted with the report.

"The rating as a whole is requires improvement and nobody is pretending it isn't, a lot of hard work has been done by a lot of people over the last three to five years to get us to this point.

"For patients it's a simple way of saying you should have more confidence in the services in your town.

"For the organisation it means less scrutiny, the world and his wife has been crawling all over what this organisation does for a long time.

"They needed assuring that we were improving, they are now assured we have reached a standard of care to make sure we are acceptable."

New ways of training staff about sepsis will be explored to ensure all staff have the mandatory training, Dr Dunderdale said.

It comes after inspectors revealed patients were "at risk of avoidable harm" due to the lack in training.

Dr Dunderdale added: "From my perspective one of the really positive things is we've been rated outstanding for caring.

"You can put as many plans in place as an organisation to improve but you can't for caring you either are or you aren't.

"I'm incredibly proud of all the staff for that."