National Quality Board July 2016
- This document includes an updated set of NQB expectations for nursing and midwifery staffing to help NHS provider boards make local decisions that will deliver high quality care for patients within the available staffing resource.
- In Sections 1, 2 and 3, updated 2013 NQB guidance is brought together with the Carter report’s findings, to set out the key principles and tools that provider boards should use to measure and improve their use of staffing resources to ensure safe, sustainable and productive services.
- Section 3 identifies three updated NQB expectations that form a ‘triangulated’ approach (‘Right Staff, Right Skills, Right Place and Time’) to staffing decisions. An approach to deciding staffing levels based on patients’ needs, acuity and risks, which is monitored from ‘ward to board’, will enable NHS provider boards to make appropriate judgements about delivering safe, sustainable and productive staffing. CQC supports this triangulated approach to staffing decisions, rather than making judgements based solely on numbers or ratios of staff to patients.
- Appendix 1 NQB recommendations for wider measures to monitor the impact of staffing on quality
- Appendix 2 Units of staffing measurement
- Appendix 3 Methods of workforce planning
- Appendix 4 Key existing evidence-based guidance for nursing and midwifery staffing
