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See what a ward is really like before you work there: Ward on the Street is now open to nursing staff

Dr Dev Gakhar

Ward on the Street now has a section for nursing staff. If you're a nurse, nursing associate, healthcare assistant (HCA) or advanced nurse practitioner (ANP), you can anonymously review the hospital department you work in, including how many patients each nurse looks after on a day shift. It's free, and it's built from what nurses told me they wanted to know.

Built from your comments

When I launched Ward on the Street for resident doctors (junior doctors), one comment kept coming up: can you do one for nurses? So I asked nurses what they'd want to know about a hospital before working there, and nurse to patient ratio was the most liked answer by far, followed by being moved to other areas, then the culture and how students are treated.

So nursing now has its own section, with its own ratings, pages and leaderboard, scored only alongside other nursing staff's reviews.

And it's not just for nurses: nursing associates, HCAs and ANPs are in there too.

Patients per nurse

Every review can say how many patients you looked after on a typical day shift, from 1 to 13 or more, or N/A if it doesn't fit your role. A hospital's nursing page shows what it usually is and how the answers spread out, so you can see what a day shift there is actually like.

What you rate

Each review rates the department on what nurses said matters: staffing and workload (being moved to other areas included), culture and teamwork, management support, breaks and finishing on time, rotas and leave, learning and development, equipment and staff rooms, plus how satisfied you are overall.

One box, in your own words

Then there's one box: what should someone know before working in this department? You could mention how often you're short or moved to other areas, the culture and how students and new starters are treated, reasonable adjustments, parking or food on nights, or the one thing you'd tell a friend thinking of applying.

How it stays anonymous

There's no sign-in, and you never give your name, registration number or band: only your role is shown beside your review, like Nurse or Healthcare assistant. Every review is checked against the guidelines before it goes live, by automated software with oversight from the Doctor Devify team.

A review can't name anyone, so it isn't the place to raise bullying or unsafe care. The nursing help page lists who can take that on, from your trust's Freedom to Speak Up Guardian to the nursing unions.

The leaderboard

The nursing leaderboard ranks hospitals on nursing reviews from the first one, and opens on the staff survey: trusts in England on the NHS Staff Survey, by whether staff would recommend them as a place to work, and Scotland's health boards on iMatter. And every hospital page already shows the trust's EPR, notes and parking, and its staff survey results: the NHS Staff Survey in England, iMatter in Scotland and, where the health board has published it, the NHS Wales Staff Survey. In England it also shows the trust's league table position.

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