NHS England ‘hopes’ an updated version of the Community Nursing Safer Staffing Tool (CNSST) will be released in October – following months of delay.
The Excel-based CNSST was hoped to be introduced fully earlier this year, and its delay has sparked frustration among the profession.
The tool aims to support community nursing teams to calculate their workforce needs, such as the number of staff required for a specific volume of work, with the aim of better managing staff workload and reducing burnout and risk.
It was finalised for testing late last year and was then trialled in a phased roll-out.
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But it required some changes post-trial before it could be properly launched this year.
Speaking at a Queen’s Nursing Institute (QNI) webinar to outline changes made to the tool, Ann Casey, deputy director for the chief nursing officer (CNO) safe staffing faculty at NHS England (NHSE), said there was ‘hope’ the refined tool would be ready in October.
Ms Casey warned she couldn’t give an exact release date, ‘because we’re still doing some testing and work’, including going through the NHSE guidance publication processes.
‘They can be quite complex, but we hope that October is a date that we can get it out there. We are not trying to delay this,’ she said.
‘We genuinely want it to be back out there and available for you, so we are putting everything we can behind getting it back out there for you to have.’
She added: ‘We recognise that the knowledge base of community nurses in workforce planning, delivery and governance has been neglected, which is making the safe adoption of the tool more challenging for community teams.’
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Paul Vaughan, national deputy director of community and primary care nursing at NHSE, joined Ms Casey in outlining the tool’s rollout, explaining that another review of the CNSST is scheduled for December 2026.
‘Just to be clear, it is good practice to do a review. So, we’re saying that in 2026, after about two years of using the new tool, we will do another review, just to make sure that things are still working as they should be,’ he explained.
Separately, speaking during a session at the King’s Fund Annual Conference last week, Dr Crystal Oldman, chief executive of the QNI, stressed that the data around community nursing demand ‘isn’t well understood’.
‘How can we build the workforce to meet the demand if we don’t know what the demand is, and we don’t collect it well enough?’ Dr Oldman said.
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‘We collect a lot of data in hospitals, and it’s not a competition, but it would be good if we had the same amount of detailed data so that we can properly build the workforce.’
Her comments came after the publication of the much-anticipated Darzi review into the NHS, which found that a lack of investment in the community nursing workforce has left the health service in a ‘critical condition.
