SWINDON’S hospital may not be large enough to cope with growing demand, its outgoing chief nurse has said.

Hilary Walker, who retires this month after more than five years in the post, said that her biggest concern has been managing the huge numbers of patients.

In common with other NHS trusts, it has just experienced one of its busiest winters on record.

“We do think we probably need more beds here, although that doesn’t align with national policy direction," she said.

“We know that Swindon is peculiar in its demographic. We’ve got all those houses going up and of course the population is growing and growing.”

GWH NHS Foundation Trust currently has more than 500 general and acute ward beds for Swindon and North Wiltshire. In Swindon alone, the population is expected to rise 14 per cent by 2031 to 265,000 people.

Ms Walker said: “The biggest concern recently has been around our ability to manage all of the patients who are arriving in need of care. We’ve had queues in our emergency department, queues in our acute medical department, we’ve had no beds for people to be cared for in or for people to be moved into, so people have been cared for on trolleys.

“There have not been enough doctors, nurses, pharmacists, therapists, to provide the best care we can. Those are the things that you worry the most about, obviously because patients are receiving care that is not exemplary, but also because of the impact that that has on staff.

“All of our staff come to work to do a good job. It is soul destroying when you can’t deliver the care that you know patients need and the care that you are professionally motivated to give. There were too many days over this past winter where people will have gone home emotionally exhausted because they haven’t been able to deliver the best care.”

Looking ahead to this winter, when pressures on the NHS could be even greater, Ms Walker said there was no single answer to tackling rising demand.

She praised work by GWH with the borough council, Swindon Clinical Commissioning Group and other agencies to pool resources, speed people out of hospital and ensure they can receive care at home.

“It’s not one thing that will make a difference. It’s lots of little things,” she said. “I think it’s really hard to assess whether all these things that make a little difference will, in the end, be enough.

“Every time we have a prediction about the activity we think we’re going to get next winter based on the best analysis we do it turns out not to be quite right. We always get more, we never get less.”

She suggested that a forthcoming watchdog report could see the Care Quality Commission upgrade the trust’s rating from Requires Improvement to Good.

“I feel that would be a great testament to the work that the organisation has focussed on over the last couple of years,” Ms Walker said. “It’s not easy to do when our financial position is as it has been. It’s so much easier to fix stuff when you’ve got money.”

The experienced nurse, who registered in 1985, said her biggest regret was being at the top during a challenging time for nurse recruitment nationally: “The number of nurses being trained coming out of university is nowhere near the number required.” The trust was working to improve retention of nurses and attract more staff from overseas.

The GWH role had been her favourite, she said: “I’ve enjoyed this job more than any other in my career. I’ve saved the best till last.”

Read the full interview in tomorrow's Swindon Advertiser.