Nurses have told the Health Secretary they are routinely being left alone on wards caring for up to 18 patients at a time.
They also warned Andrew Lansley that cost-cutting hospitals are now replacing senior nurses with cheap, untrained healthcare assistants.
The head of the Royal College of Nursing told Mr Lansley there was ‘a great deal of unhappiness in the NHS’ with many staff ‘at the end of their tether’.
Dr Peter Carter, general secretary of the RCN, said it was ‘nonsense’ for the Government to try to claim the number of frontline NHS staff was increasing, when thousands of nurses have been axed since they came to power.
Figures revealed by the RCN yesterday ahead of their annual conference in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, showed that a total of 3,588 nursing and midwifery posts had been lost since March 2010.
The Government initially disputed these figures and pointed out that the number of clinical posts – which include doctors and scientists, as well as nurses – had gone up.
But yesterday during a speech to the conference Mr Lansley conceded that there were indeed fewer nurses, although he insisted they could still provide the same standard of care for patients.
He was repeatedly jeered and heckled as he attempted to allay concerns over the cuts to the NHS and his controversial health bill.
One ward sister stood up and told Mr Lansley that nurses were routinely having to look after 18 patients at a time, many of whom were elderly.
Rachel Armstrong, from the RCN’s Liverpool and Knowsley branch, said: ‘This is happening across the country. The system has very little leeway.
‘The patients have acute needs, many are elderly patients.
‘If you don’t have enough staff, the care for patients will suffer – there is only so much you can do.’
Earlier this year a separate report by the RCN found that nurses were so busy that three in four did not have enough time to even talk to patients.
The average nurse looks after between six and seven patients at a time.
Often nurses do not have the time to help every patient eat their meals or answer call bells as they are too busy prioritising those with the most urgent needs.
Another nurse, Barbara Jane Waltho, from the East Dorset branch, said the NHS was now ‘on the critical list’.
Addressing the Health Secretary, she said: ‘You said the NHS would not deteriorate on your watch.
‘Would you concede that the NHS has not been as well cared for on your watch as you promised?’
Others revealed that senior nurses with decades of experience were now being replaced by healthcare assistants with no medical qualifications.
Although the NHS’s budget has not been cut, it has been ordered to save £20billion over the next three years and provide care more efficiently.
Ministers want hospitals and health trusts to cut unnecessary bureaucracy and set aside money for reinvestment later.
But many NHS trusts have resorted to slashing staffing levels and restricting treatments to meet targets.
Dr Carter later accused the Government of running the NHS ‘unintelligently’.
In a speech after the Health Secretary had left, he said nurses were becoming ‘increasingly fed up, disaffected and at the end of their tether’.
source: dailymail.co.uk
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