Staff at the University Hospital of North Staffordshire NHS trust will undergo "redundancy interviews" to help the trust to decide which posts should stay and which should be cut. Interviewees will be assessed on a range of criteria, including qualifications, performance, sickness absence and willingness to change, reports Nursing Times (Aug 22).

Almost 400 nursing posts are expected to go as part of the 1,000 redundancies planned to help the trust to return to financial stability.
Chris Bourne, the Stoke and district branch secretary at the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), says that in some situations the nurse's manager may also be questioned.

"Some of these [criteria] are hard to measure, so a person's line manager will be interviewed," he says. "Nurses are very angry and looking for action. We are trying to minimise the numbers of staff going through compulsory redundancies."

A spokesman for the trust says that redundancies were an inevitable aspect of efforts to rebalance its finances and that the selection process "will be both fair and transparent".

Practice nurses are also concerned about the way their skills are to be tested. Newly proposed revalidation processes, designed to assess nurses' ongoing fitness to practise, could see GPs passing judgment on them despite knowing little about nursing skills, the magazine says in a separate story.

Sue Nutbrown, chairwoman of the RCN's Practice Nurses Association, says: "It has always been a problem with GPs knowing what we do and what competencies we need to do it. I don't think that GPs have the time or would even want to do it."

A spokesman for the British Medical Association's GP committee agrees that many GPs would be concerned at having to do it. "It is one thing having an appraisal system within the practice, it is quite another thing to ask practices to be involved in revalidation," he says.

A Department of Health spokesman says that the revalidation proposals are in early development and that no decisions have yet been taken on the details.

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