Using Quality Improvement to reduce nursing vacancies Trust wide.

 21st March 2024

What is the problem we’re trying to solve?

Work is underway to reduce our nursing vacancies across the Trust. Over the past few years, across ELFT we have had a high number of nursing vacancies, with specific challenges for band 5 and 6 nursing roles.

This challenge is something that is shared with many other Trusts, with NHS England reporting record vacancies nationwide. We know this has a direct impact on outcomes for our service users and that this impacts on staff wellbeing.

We care about our people and want to support our nurses to grow, learn, and enjoy what they do. That’s why we have made improving staff experience one of four main objectives in our Trust strategy. And that’s why we are we have a Trust-Wide QI project underway to tackle this. With multiple issues contributing to the nursing vacancy challenge, taking a quality improvement approach makes sense. It provides us with a systematic methodology which we can apply to this complex issue.

 

What has been happening so far as part of the work?

So far, work to recruit to these posts is paying off, with a downward trend in vacancies now sitting at under 14%. See figure 1 showing a P Chart of the percentage of band 5 and 6 nursing roles that are vacant across ELFT.

But we know that it’s important for us to focus on both recruitment and retention so that we can sustain improvements over time and make our services more stable.

This is a big task, so we have set up work-streams to chunk up the work, making it more manageable. Those workstreams involve staff, service users, and teams across the Trust.

There is a lot of work already taking place, and some of these workstreams are capturing what is working well so that we can spread these ideas. For example, defining the most effective method for running recruitment events. See Figure 2 for a photo from a recent recruitment event.

 

What’s next for the work?

Soon we will have a dashboard available for everyone on Power BI, showing vacancy data across the Trust. This will be vital to truly understanding how we are doing. And we are about to begin work to focus more on retention and development of our existing nursing workforce. Check back soon to hear how things are progressing.

Figure 1: Outcome measure: P Chart showing the percentage of band 5 and 6 nursing roles that are vacant across ELFT

 

 Figure 2: Photo from a recent recruitment event