Trust staff 'would not want to be patients' (From Times Series)

Trust staff 'would not want to be patients'

7:00am Wednesday 4th April 2007

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NEARLY half of the staff at a NHS trust would not want to be patients in their own hospital, a shocking survey has revealed.

Just 22 per cent of staff questioned at the West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs St Albans, Hemel Hempstead and Watford hospitals, said they would be happy with the standard of care provided if they were patients. Forty-eight per cent said they would be unhappy - giving the trust one of the worst results in England and Wales.

Last year the troubled trust reported a deficit of £26 million, and bosses are currently trying to centralise acute and emergency services at Watford General to "improve quality of care for local people".

St Albans MP Anne Main called the survey results "depressing". She said: "The staff are pretty demoralised with the reconfigurations that are going on. The staff are doing their best with very, very limited resources. I think they're suffering a huge loss of confidence."

Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate Sandy Walkington added: "What does it say about our own local hospitals that half the staff have no confidence in the healthcare provided? This is a further searing indictment of what has been allowed to happen to the health service in west Hertfordshire.

"Any manager of a large organisation knows that staff surveys are barometers of the health and wellbeing of an organisation. If staff are unhappy, patients are going to be unhappy too."

The survey, carried out by the Healthcare Commission, showed that job satisfaction among staff at the West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust had fallen, with more people intending to leave their jobs than in the previous year's survey.

West Herts fell in the worst 20 per cent of trusts for several categories in the survey, including the extent of positive feeling within the organisation. Seventy per cent of staff said they were working longer hours than they were contracted to and the number of workers happy with the quality of their work life balance had also fallen.

More than half of workers who responded to the survey felt communication between staff and managers was not effective, and nearly 60 per cent felt that the different parts of the trust did not communicate effectively with each other. Just over 40 per cent did not think patient care was the trust's top priority.

A spokesman for the trust said the survey showed improvements in the amount of work-related stress suffered, the availability of alcohol rubs and the number of errors or near misses endangering patients.

He said: "As an organisation we are in a period of significant change to services, the outcome of which will be improved quality of care to local people.

"However periods of change can adversely affect staff morale and the trust is committed to working with staff and trade unions to minimise the adverse impact of these changes."

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