NHS Healthcare Assistants Relied on to Perform Nurses’ Duties

A survey by Public Service Union, Unison, has identified that almost two thirds of Healthcare Assistants (HCAs) employed by the NHS are performing duties ordinarily carried out by nurses.

HCAs are becoming more relied upon to fill staffing gaps, whilst the NHS struggles to cope with demand as it is understaffed by approximately 40,000 nurses.

The survey asked 2,000 HCAs about their roles; 63% of respondents said that they were ‘providing patient care with worryingly little help from doctors and nurses’, but devastatingly 39% did not feel confident that the patients they were caring for were receiving safe care.

Following a very difficult winter, 41% of HCAs asked reported that they had been required to carry out tasks outside of their usual roles and more than half said that they have not received adequate training for day-to-day tasks, including dressing wounds, dispensing medication and changing stoma bags.

The situation has not gone unnoticed. Jonathan Ashworth, Shadow Health Secretary, recognises that the “situation is getting worse year by year” as the NHS loses one in ten nurses every year. In 2016-2017, 33,500 nurses left the NHS but just 30,500 joined, demonstrating that recruitment and retention is unable to balance those leaving for various reasons.

Ashworth continued to say that the reliance on untrained staff is “putting patient safety at risk. It’s totally unacceptable to expect healthcare assistants to fill in, effectively acting up while denying them the training and support they deserve for taking on extra responsibilities.”

The NHS Careers website describes HCAs as working under the guidance of a “qualified healthcare professional, usually a nurse” and says that expected duties within a hospital include; washing and dressing patients, serving meals and helping to feed patients, toileting, making beds and taking temperatures, pulse, respiration and weight measurements.

A solicitor in the Medical Negligence team at Ashtons comments “HCAs are intended to provide a necessary, patient-facing, support network that enables the cogs of the NHS machine to work efficiently. If we have untrained staff carrying out tasks that they do not feel confident to carry out, then the foundations that we need for a strong healthcare system are not strong enough.

“Apart from placing employees in the difficult position of being judged if they express unwillingness to perform tasks that they are not trained to do, we are allowing patient care to become compromised. Such compromise can lead to mistakes and ultimately irreversible injury, and unfortunately it is these circumstances that we are familiar with in the Medical Negligence team. It is essential that the source of the problem is tackled. Whilst this seems an impossible task, recruiting people to do one job and requiring them to do another is unlikely to help recruitment or retention”.