New Cross bid to lure back nurses

Hospital bosses will look to a pool of former nurses to try and tackle a shortage of staff on wards at New Cross.

The Royal Wolverhampton Trust says it needs 122 qualified nurses and 21 health care assistants to be fully staffed.

It will now scour the country in efforts to meet its shortfall, with the board looking at a pool of 200,000 qualified nurses who are no-longer in the profession to see if it can coax them back into nursing.

Cheryl Etches, director of nursing at the trust, said: "According to the Nursing & Midwifery Council, there are 200,000 nurses who are registered to work. We are seeing if they could return and come back into the service and we are working with Health Education West Midlands and the University of Wolverhampton on how this could be achieved.

"Half of the problem is getting nurses in, the other problem is we want them to stay because we want to keep our good staff."

Earlier this year, trust bosses controversially went looking outside the UK for workers, recruiting 78 staff from Greece and Italy.

The recruitment drive came after criticism from the Care Quality Commission (CQC), which revealed in a report that at night there was one nurse for every 10 patients.

And in June, the Express & Star revealed that the foreign nurses were having lessons in 'Yam-Yam' to understand the Black Country lingo of patients.

Chief executive, David Loughton said: "It is not a money issue. When the CQC conducted their report, New Cross Hospital was one of 17 hospitals out of 18 where staffing was an issue. It was only a hospital near Brize Norton in Oxfordshire which was over staffed because it had all the resources of the military.

"We are all fishing from the same pond and it is a challenge to recruit nurses and to get them to come to Wolverhampton because others may want to opt for a job in London or other parts of the country.

"The 140 staff wouldn't be able to come in in one go anyway. They would need to trained and packaged properly.

"Some of those who are registered nurses may be retired or they may be in the pharmaceutical industry but have remained registered as a back-up. We don't know and we are exploring that."