STRESSED staff at Russells Hall Hospital shared fears for patients' safety with health watchdog officials, a report has revealed.

Care Quality Commission inspectors revisited the hospital's emergency department on March 15, in response to concerns about the management of patient flow through A&E.

The visit came just three months after a routine inspection, saw the Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust, which runs the hospital, rated as 'requires improvement'.

The latest inspection found there was not "sufficient" medical and nursing cover to meet the needs of patients.

Concerns were raised about the number of agency or bank staff being used as they "may not fully understand the hospital processes and systems to keep patients safe".

Inspectors were told that teams were stressed, "not coping as a result of the high number of agency staff" and did not feel the environment was safe for patients as a result of the staffing numbers and skills mix.

Whilst inspectors saw improvements in how frequently patient’s observations were being taken, they remained concerned about how quickly and appropriately staff responded to patients with serious and deteriorating conditions as nursing staff followed the National Early Warning Score to completely dictate the frequency of observations - despite displaying a lack of understanding of what the system was, why they were doing it and what their response should have been.

The report also said that sepsis screening was still not undertaken for all patients, with senior doctors saying they screened for the condition automatically 'in their head'.

Diane Wake, chief executive at the trust, said: "We recognise there is work to do to ensure our services are the best they can be for our patients and we are supporting staff to make the improvements we need to ensure safe, effective, responsive and well-led services."

She said support had been drafted in to focus on "quality improvement" within the emergency department, adding: "We have increased senior nurse support, re-trained staff in effective triage processes and focused the teams on care of the deteriorating patient.

"We’ve done this through further sepsis training, the introduction of our electronic sepsis management system and additional support from the sepsis team in the emergency department."

Ms Wake said recruiting and retaining staff "remains a key priority", adding: "We use agency staff to cover staff shortages and ensure our patients are safe and cared for by appropriately skilled staff at all times, we are actively recruiting and are driving down our use of agency."