This page provides information about staffing numbers in our overnight clinical areas. Very few patients at Moorfields need to stay overnight as most eye treatments can now be provided on a day care basis, meaning that patients are treated and sent home on the same day.
To ensure that we provide safe and effective care to our patients, it is important that we adequately staff our wards with the correct number of registered nurses and support staff to provide good quality care.
The staffing establishment - the number of nurses we need to provide care - is monitored through a duty rota.
When planning the requirements, consideration is given to the type of care patients receive, the complexity of the care and the number of patients being treated on the ward that day.
We aim to ensure that at any one time during the day, there will be a ratio of one nurse caring for a group of three patients. This takes into account the numbers of patients being admitted to the ward during the day. During the night and at weekends, the workload differs and our staffing ratio will reflect this. We aim to ensure that during nights and weekends, out staffing ratio is set at a minimum of one registered nurse to six patients.
Registered nurses are often supported by staff who assist in caring for patients. Many of the support staff have vocational qualifications in caring but are not registered on the professional nursing register of the United Kingdom.