A CAMPAIGN group claims a shortage of ‘around 100’ nurses in the Northern Devon Healthcare NHS Trust area is the cause of the temporary closure of hospital beds at Holsworthy.

But the NHS Trust states it currently has 57.4 whole time equivalent nursing vacancies, which it said is 7.2% of its registered nursing workforce.

It says these figures are across the Trust and includes its community nursing services, for example district nursing, bladder and bowel, and sexual health.

A spokesperson for the Trust said: “This is much better than the national average, which is 11.9%.”

The claims about the shortage recently came from the Save Our Hospital Services (SOHS) group.

John Wardman from the campaign group Save Our Hospital Services (SOHS) said: “As a result of this failure at a local level Holsworthy and Ilfracombe hospital beds have both been closed because of a shortage of nurses to adequately staff them similarly maternity units at Honiton, Okehampton, Crediton and Tiverton are also closed or under threat because of a shortage of nurses.

“Whilst the closure is ‘temporary’, it seems unlikely nurses are going to be conjured up or trained anytime soon.”

The beds at Holsworthy closed in March, as the Trust said ‘it was not considered safe to continue operating the 16 inpatient beds’.

This was due to insufficient patients needing an admission to Holsworthy Hospital and insufficient availability of staff to run the inpatient unit safely.

The Trust has said: “We know that there is a great deal of support for our community hospitals, and we appreciate this decision will cause concern. However, we cannot fail in our aim to provide safe, high-quality and sustainable services to our patients.

“Even if we do manage to recruit and train more nurses and therapy staff, we will still have the problem of low and decreasing occupancy at the hospital. This means that we will be putting these staff at risk of skills degradation and not being able to revalidate through the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC).

“We will be working with the CCG (NEW Devon Clinical Commissioning Group) to develop a model of care that will enable us to provide services that meet the needs of the people of North Devon and Torridge within the resources available.”

On nursing vacancies, Darryn Allcorn, director of nursing, quality and workforce at the Northern Devon Healthcare NHS Trust, said: “We are doing much better than the national average when it comes to nursing vacancies, and our staff retention is good, but like any organisation we experience turnover of staff.

“In addition to our on-going recruitment efforts, we hold nursing recruitment open days twice a year and at our most recent open day, we successfully recruited a number of nurses and student nurses who will impact our vacancy figure when they start to work for the Trust.

“These efforts have helped us to more than halve our spend on agency staff, comparing 2015/16 to 2016/17. We also have our own Staff Bank, through which both existing Trust staff and bank only workers can pick up shifts that might previously have been filled by agency workers. By using workers from our own staff bank, we can ensure that shifts are covered by people who are familiar with the Trust and how our services work, which is better for patients and is much more cost-effective than using agency workers. This particularly works well for staff who need flexibility.

“We are exceptionally proud of our nurses, who deliver high-quality care to our patients with compassion and skill every day.”

The Trust has joined with town, district and county councillors and other representatives to form a stakeholder group to consider all the requirements necessary to reopen the inpatient beds at Holsworthy Hospital.

To date, according to the ‘Holsworthy engagement’ section of the Trust’s website, the Trust has not re-opened inpatient beds at a community hospital after temporarily closing them.

Although the beds remain closed, the Trust and hospital staff stress all outpatient clinics are open at Holsworthy Hospital.

Details of ongoing discussions can be found on the NDHT website at www.northdevonhealth.nhs.uk/have-your-say/Holsworthyengagement