Health workers have missed vital training due to staff shortages during strike action, the trust that runs Shropshire’s two acute hospitals has said.
The board of directors of the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust (SaTH) has heard that staff have had to be taken away from other duties in order to cover shifts impacted by recent industrial action.
As well as missing training, staff have also not been able to dedicate as much time as planned to the trust’s emergency care transformation programme.
The meeting was also told that national training sessions run on by the trust may need to be cancelled in the event of future strikes.
Rosi Edwards, chair of the trust’s quality and safety assurance committee, said: “In addition to extreme tiredness and weariness of all involved in planning what we do – and actually doing it – to cover the industrial action, it’s having an impact on training and programmes of improvement work in emergency and urgent care.”
Board chair Dr Catriona McMahon asked chief executive Louise Barnett how leaders were ensuring improvement work did not fall behind schedule.
Ms Barnett said: “Today they are staying on top of the improvement work. The planning for the industrial action takes a lot of time and takes them away from doing the improvements.
“We are seeing people having to work as opposed to being part of the improvement workstreams, but at this moment in time we are staying on top of the improvements within the emergency care transformation programme.”
Turning to the training concerns, Hayley Flavell, director of nursing, said: “From an educational perspective it’s a new risk that we are seeing.
“As you know we are seeing industrial action probably monthly, so it’s impacting on the ability to deliver some of the mandatory training because people who would be on mandatory training are on the shop floor.
“Also we have had some concerns regarding some of our national courses that we run.
“We run paediatric life support [training] and also advanced life support, which we haven’t stopped on industrial action days, but it was flagged up last time that it might potentially start causing us a problem.
“This is an early heads up really in terms of education.”
It was revealed last week that 513 trust employees walked out during the latest round of strike action among consultants and junior doctors at the start of October, leading to 249 procedures and appointments being cancelled.
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