Mayday Hospital needs an urgent cash injection of £2 million to cure its "desperate" nursing crisis, the hospital's deputy chief executive Frank McGurrin has admitted.

The admission comes as a result of a damning report on nursing levels and quality of care by the Commission for Health Improvement (CHI) in September, which said the situation was in places "unacceptable", and asked the hospital to carry out an urgent review.

The trust shelled out £2,000 to auditors Price Waterhouse Cooper to establish exactly where it stood in relation to the rest of the country, and was told that 94 extra full time nurses at a cost of £2 million were needed to bring it in line with the average.

The report showed that Mayday has the lowest number of nurses relative to the number of patients it treats in the whole of London, and the 12th lowest in the country.

The shortage is reflected in reports of nurses not always having time to communicate with patients to fully judge their needs.

Mr McGurrin told the Croydon Guardian: "We need this money to get us to the average, so presently we need to achieve the recommendations as a minimum.

"Nursing levels are desperate and this is not something that we can leave running."

He added: "The staff are much too stretched and feel they aren't being given the opportunity to provide the quality of care they would like to.

"We have been in this situation for many years now and it's about time we got it sorted as an absolute priority."

Asked why Mayday had been allowed to get to such a bleak point, Mr McGurrin said: "I don't know whether the reason for this is that in the past we haven't made our case strongly enough to Croydon Health Authority, or whether it's because we haven't had the comparative data against which to measure our standards."

The nurses would be of different skills mixes and grades, and would be recruited to fill shortfalls in some of the hospital's 24 wards, but not all wards need more nurses.

Mayday has submitted a request for the cash to be included in next year's budget and should know the health authority's decision by the end of January.

December 6, 2001 11:00