Patients are being put at risk because hundreds of hospital wards do not have enough nurses to look after them properly.
Analysis for The Times reveals that 43 per cent of wards have a staffing level lower than one nurse per eight patients, a “red zone” flagged by a recent government safety report.
“I would have hoped that less than 10 per cent of wards would be at these danger levels,” Jane Ball, deputy director of the National Nursing Research Unit at King’s College London, who led the research, said.
“We should all be gravely concerned about this. It’s not simply that nurses aren’t able to talk to patients and comfort people, it’s about levels of surveillance. Having fewer skilled people to keep an