Royal Liverpool Hospital: The point of care

Source: Healthcare Exec

Date :05/12/2007 09:32:25

The Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust has decided that its policies must be decided by what happens on the hospital wards, not the other way around.

Written by John O’Hanlon and produced by Paul Radbourne

Many senior administrators in the health service come from a nursing background, though quite a few of these don’t noise it abroad. They are still wary of the perception that nursing is the handmaiden of the health service. But that perception belongs, as they say, in the history books.

Nursing, as every one of us who has ever been in hospital knows, is right at the sharp end of the NHS. We should therefore be very glad when the people who run the hospitals come from a nursing background. They have their priorities right.

Talib Yaseen OBE, Acting Chief Executive of RLBUHT, had been directing nursing services for 14 years before moving from his job as director of nursing & quality, and director of infection, prevention and control, to take on his present role in May 2006. He has no doubt whatever of the need to focus the management on the all important ‘point of care’. “Get nursing right and you have 90 percent of the business right,” he says.

A magnet for good nurses

That’s a big claim for a big business, one that employs 5,500 people and has an annual budget of £300 million. To run a commercial company of that size would be the dream of many aspiring executives. Yet such companies are only now beginning to get their heads round the idea that their customers’ experience is vital. Vital? Literally so in the health service. “Low mortality, and good outcomes, are directly related to good nursing practice,” says Yaseen.

“Hospitals where this is understood are magnets for good nurses,” he added when I pointed out to him that the public’s view of the nursing profession is coloured by stories of low pay, low motivation and low standards of training…

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