The chief nurse of Brighton’s main hospital trust has quit for a new job in London.
Nicola Ranger will leave her role as chief nursing and patient safety officer at Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust (BSUH) in June.
The trust runs the Royal Sussex County Hospital, Royal Alexandra Children’s Hospital and Sussex Eye Hospital in Brighton as well as the Princess Royal Hospital in Haywards Heath.
Ms Ranger joined the board when the current executive team – from the neighbouring Western Sussex Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust – took over BSUH in April 2017.
She holds the same post on the Western board and, at the end of July, will become chief nurse and director of nursing and midwifery at King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. King’s is one of the biggest and busiest hospitals in Britain.
In Brighton and at Western she will be replaced by two chief nurses – one for each of the trusts – with recruitment for the posts already under way.
BSUH chief executive Dame Marianne Griffiths said: “Our chief nurse Nicola Ranger will be leaving in June to take up a new opportunity at King’s in London.
“Nicola is a fantastic advocate for nursing and midwifery and also champions improvements to patient experience in many ways.
“I have sought views about nursing leadership and structure and had discussions with nursing colleagues across the trust over the past few weeks and, in light of this, am pleased to confirm our plans to further strengthen the voice of nursing at board level.
“The new BSUH structure will include a chief nurse, a voting trust board member, dedicated to BSUH.
“This is a change from the current structure where our chief nurse is a group role working across Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals and WSHT.
“There will now be a chief nurse at each organisation and the recruitment process for this post begins now.”
Ms Ranger previously worked at Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust as director of nursing for four and a half years years until early 2017.
She was part of the team that led Frimley Park to become the first acute hospital to be rated “outstanding” by the CQC.
Before this, she was deputy chief nurse at University College London Hospitals. Her clinical background was in intensive care nursing and she spent four years working in critical care units in New York and Washington DC.
Under the PR gloss at the Royal Sussex, much remains to be done. Some of the new ‘executive’ team from Western are pretty good, but they duck a genuine dialogue, unless they’re sure of getting the answers they want to hear. It would be good if the likes of Brighton and Hove News shone the spotlight of scrutiny a little brighter on the trust, asked hard questions and published the answers without fear or favour.
Twice I’ve visited relatives at the Royal Sussex in the past six months and both times I felt the care on the wards was sub-optimal. Probably not enough to complain about and no single specific incident rang alarm bells. There’s a bit too much PC chat and psycho-babble from a few of the staff and not enough genuine nursing care. The low-grade health assistants had the best manner but seemed to lack real knowledge. It seemed the more knowledge or expertise someone had, the less they could be bothered to actually care for a patient. And once or twice I heard staff speak in a way that certainly wasn’t PC but bordered on racially offensive.