'Make nurses the centre of workforce planning' urges nursing academic

Listen to nurses when it comes to transforming health services, urges a renowned nursing leader.

Head of the division of nursing at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, Brendan McCormack wants nurses needs and wishes to be taken into consideration in a more ‘person-centred’ approach to workforce planning.

Talking tonight as part of a series of healthcare lectures being given at the university in Musselburgh, East Lothian, he said it was about ‘finding positives’ in nursing rather than ‘focusing on negatives’.

He was inspired to choose this theme Achieving Excellence in Care: Dancing with Beauty – Rather than Fighting Ugliness, after noticing a surge in media reports in which nurses have received bad press.

These include the Mid-Staffordshire failings, reaction to nurses threatening industrial action over pay in Northern Ireland, and the findings of the Commission on Dignity in Care for Older People which made recommendations after failings in care for older people in hospitals and care homes.

Professor McCormack also pointed to a recent blog by the chief nursing officer for Scotland Fiona McQueen in which she highlighted rudeness by nurses which she had witnessed.

He said: ‘From my perspective, we nurses have taken quite a hammering with the narrative being "nursing has lost its way and we don’t care", but that is so not true.

‘Many organisations I see now have nurses who no longer feel passionate about their work; they feel disregarded and unable to flourish.

‘The result of this constraint is they lose the ability to think creatively and to use the incredible skills and knowledge they possess to deal with every situation they face.

‘Only a collaborative, inclusive and participative approach will allow contemporary nursing to achieve excellence and transform.

‘We need proper workforce modelling which bites the bullet and tells nurses how many of them are needed and what they need to do.

‘This is something the policymakers and the nurses should both be pushing for.’

Professor McCormack, who still works as a nurse in geratology, began researching person-centred approaches to workforce management in the 1980s, when he witnessed abusive practices within the mental health system.

He said: ‘It was very easy to blame people for this, but I realised what was needed were effective cultures to help people see what else was possible.’