Publication: Planning ward nursing - legacy or design?

Over £1 billion is spent on nurses in Scotland each year. This report, for the Auditor General, highlights the need for improved planning of the nursing workforce, better information to support this task and the introduction of measures of the quality of patient care to ensure we get value for money. There are over 50,000 nurses in Scotland and the report says that workforce planning needs to be improved. Too few staff are dedicated to the important task of ensuring that the right number of nurses are in the right place at the right time. It says that lack of planning has resulted in wide variation in the number of nurses caring for patients in similar wards.