Four years on from the passing of Scotland’s groundbreaking safe staffing legislation

Today [6 June] marks four years since the Health and Care (Staffing) (Scotland) Act was passed by the Scottish Parliament. While we are still waiting for the Act to be implemented, thanks to our sustained pressure, the Scottish Government has committed to the Act coming into force next April, and work is underway to prepare for this.

The latest NHS workforce statistics published today show why this groundbreaking safe staffing legislation is so badly needed. With over 4,000 registered nurse vacancies across Scotland’s NHS, and 60% of care services reporting nursing vacancies, the staffing crisis facing our health and care services has never been more apparent.

The Act is the first in the UK to set out safe staffing requirements across health and care services. As well as placing a new legal duty on NHS and care providers to make sure there are always suitably qualified staff working in the right numbers, it requires NHS boards to seek clinical advice when making staffing decisions and to establish clear reporting and escalation processes for concerns. It also contains robust reporting requirements for NHS boards and Scottish Ministers to set out how they are meeting their safe staffing duties. 

We’ve been working with Scottish Government to help develop the guidance that will support effective implementation of the Act. A public consultation on the guidance will be launched by Scottish government soon and we are keen to engage with members, particularly those who manage frontline teams, to ensure they can have their say about the quality of the guidance. We will share more information soon about how you can get involved.

However, it is clear the Act itself is not a single solution to the nursing workforce crisis in Scotland. Safe staffing levels need to be the norm, not the exception, and this requires urgent action to tackle the high number of nursing vacancies, as well as investment to allow providers to meet their safe staffing duties.

Successful implementation relies entirely on retaining and recruiting more nurses, key challenges that the new Ministerial Nursing and Midwifery Taskforce has been set up to address. The Taskforce, a direct result of your campaigning, comes at a pivotal moment and is much-needed recognition of the nursing workforce crisis. 

The scale of the pressures facing Scotland’s nursing staff is hard to overstate. But I am hopeful that implementation of the Safe Staffing Act, and the Nursing and Midwifery Taskforce, will deliver positive change for the nursing profession in response to these challenges. Scotland’s nursing staff, and those they care for, cannot afford for them not to.