News update - Hospital at Night Baseline Report released

The Hospital at Night Baseline Report has been made available this week. It assesses the impact of the Hospital at Night model of working at night across the NHS. It looks at how trusts are adopting or using the multi-professional approach to care and is the first major assessment of progress since Hospital at Night was introduced in 2004.

The report is a key tool for anyone involved in Hospital at Night. As well as highlighting success and challenges, it provides advice and information on next steps to take. The findings are from a survey of NHS Trusts carried out in the summer of 2006.

The key findings include:

• Almost half of NHS trusts in England have adopted the Hospital at Night method of team working and are seeing clear benefits from the new system
• As well as providing new opportunities and enhanced roles for nursing staff, some hospital trusts using the model are reporting a reduction in clinical incidents
• Trusts need to provide clear senior leadership and provide the initial financial investment to develop Hospital at Night in order to see the patient benefit and longer term productivity and efficiency rewards that it can provide
• It as a key part of work in the move towards compliance with the Working Time Directive 2009 (WTD) with the opportunity to develop new roles.

You can access the PDF of the final report by clicking here (Note - this may require a recent version of adobe acrobat reader to open which can be downloaded at www.adobe.com ) You can access a press release with more information on the report here. You can find both of these documents, along with a range of other Working Time Directive 2009 resources, on the NHS Workforce Portal at www.healthcareworkforce.nhs.uk

Click here to download the report in word format