Luton hospital investigated using nurses and non clinical staff to clean wards amid 'extraordinary pressures'

Concerns had been raised on social media that specialist nursing staff were being asked to clean the wards because of a shortage of cleaning staff.

A briefing note sent to the specialist nursing teams included such tasks as cleaning and tidying sluices, cleaning high touch points such as door knobs, phones and keyboards, tidying and decluttering the ward area, answering phones and observing patients while other staff took a break.

Professor Alison Leary, chair of healthcare and workforce modelling at London South Bank University, took to Twitter to say the proposals showed little respect for nurses and would damage staff retention..

“Specialist nurses are usually complex case holders and key to keeping people out of hospital,” she said.

“Assuming they can simply drop their work and it will have no effect on patients or the organisation is a very risky one.”

But a spokesman for the L&D said the proposals were part of a bigger scheme for action at the hospital if needed, and all clinical and non clinical staff had been included in the discussions.

They said: “An internal discussion to plan for how we would keep our wards safe in a worst case scenario was held two weeks ago, in preparation for if we continued to experience the extraordinary pressures we have been facing since the middle of July.

“In this discussion we considered how staff from all professional groups (including non-clinical staff) could contribute to supporting the ward teams in a period of unprecedented pressure, and continuing high levels of absence due to Covid-19. A message sent to some of our Clinical Nurse Specialists was part of one team’s response to the request to plan for this eventuality.

“Fortunately the pressures reduced over the course of that week and it was not necessary to ask staff who are not usually based on the wards to help. If we had to move any staff member in extremis, a conversation would take place about how that individual felt they could best contribute to patient safety and the wellbeing of their ward-based colleagues.”