WORKING under special measures, Wye Valley NHS Trust faces “significant challenges” in finding nursing and medical staff with over 200 full time equivalent posts currently going through recruitment processes.

Increasingly, the trust is looking to the EU and beyond to boost numbers, with a range of recruitment programmes now underway.

Staffing challenges are most immediately apparent on the wards at Hereford County Hospital which struggle to retain full nursing complements.

Most wards are seeing more newly qualified and EU nurses and the trust accepts that it will have to continue to recruit from overseas.

The challenges see the Trust developing action plans for so-called “worry wards” and other departments where staff turnover is high.

Latest figures show an increase of 18.25 whole time equivalent roles across the trust’s substantive workforce during October.

Over the month, temporary staff comprised of 6.8% of the trust’s total workforce, down by just over 7% on September.

Staff turnover that has gradually increased over the past year started dropping in August.

An exercise is underway to collate and analyse exit interview data to identify trends and action plans for so-called “worry wards” and other departments struggling to retain staff.

There are currently 204 full time equivalent posts going through the recruitment process - around 8% of the workforce.

A review of recruitment processes has also been undertaken to tighten the time between recruitment from advertisement to taking up post.

The Trust is still experiencing recruitment issues to a large number of middle grade posts including A&E and Medicine.

Consultants’ posts in Anaesthetics and A&E are said to be particularly hard to fill.

The Trust has commissioned recruitment agencies to support an overseas medical recruitment programme.

Amongst nursing posts, the recruitment issues are in district nursing, the virtual ward, and ITU.

A recruitment drive, supported by recruitment agencies, has just begun to secure Theatres staff.

Recruitment is progressing slowly for the Stroke unit which has a high number of bank and agency staff.

Since September 2012 the trust has increased the number of District Nurse students.

In 2012, two took the Specialist Practitioner Course and four last year.

There are around 30 members of the District Nursing workforce who are over 50, another 25 that are within the 45-49 year bracket which will start to impact on recruitment in the next couple of years.