High Quality Care for All and the local visions developed by Strategic Health Authorities that accompanied it set an ambitious goal of putting quality at the heart of the NHS by making it its organising principle.

Achieving this goal will require the greatest movement for change in the 60 years since the NHS was created to provide healthcare free at the point of need, transforming the health and social landscape of the UK.

The quality agenda demands a shift from a monolithic, top-down, one-size-fits-all service to a more open, localised and responsive system focused on the needs of individual patients. The NHS Constitution also commits the service to providing high-quality services and to continuous improvement in quality.

We are well placed to make this a reality: we have enjoyed several years of financial stability; great achievements have been made in priority areas such as reducing waiting times and reducing infection; there are historic levels of patient confidence in the NHS and staff satisfaction is high.  However, most commentators agree that pressures on public spending will increase for the foreseeable future and that we are likely to enter a period of financial constraint. The challenge is to ensure that we continue to make quality happen during a period in which growth in expenditure on the NHS is likely to be restricted.

WIFFY

Where does it say about providing adequate staffing so that we can provide high standards of care, which we are always striving to do, but are not given the tools to do so.
And by adequate staffing I mean what the nurses on the frontline say is adequate, not the managers.
I have 27 years experience in many areas now, NHS, private, community, all over UK and it is the same everywhere, high quality patient care is difficult as money is involved.
Many staff work many hours overtime, to try to fufull their workload and to do the best they can in very difficult circustances.
That is why many have left and many nurses from abroad have filled their posts.
I have found that some nurses (from UK and abroad) are not up to standard, because the choice is not available anymore.

Stephanie Ellsworth Kharsa

I could not agree with you more. I am a Canadian trained nurse who has worked in three other countries and last year I decided to do a Return to Practice Course to get back into nursing.
The NHS is different to anything I have ever nursed in.
Staffing is a problem everywhere and patients are put at risk due to shortage of front line nursing staff. The system is top heavy and will surely collapse on itself.
Patients are people, not numbers and certainly not TASKS to be dealt with. They are more sick now than 25 years ago when I entered nursing. That means the time spent with them takes longer. Are nursing -patient hours thought about when allocating staff for shifts? Or is it just the number of patients in a ward?

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