Under-staffing

Nurses are vital to the day to day running of a hospital - if there aren't enough, wards can be closed and operations cancelled.

Darren Jordon examines how shortages in nursing staff across the UK are stretching hospitals to the limit.

Cameras follow a ward manager at the Whiston Hospital on Merseyside as she struggles to find enough nursing cover for the weekend shifts.

In Scotland, we meet a grandmother who said goodbye to her family because she may have died during a heart operation, only to wake up and find it had been cancelled.

Recruitment crisis

The NHS is losing nurses faster than it can recruit them.

A quarter of nurses will retire in the next five years and 12% of them want to quit within two years.

Lynne Faulds Wood questions why nurses are leaving, where they are going and whether the recruitment schemes around the country will enlist enough nurses in time to keep the wards staffed.

Poaching foreign nurses

Navdip Dhariwal travels to South Africa to investigate the way that nursing shortages are being exacerbated by the numbers of nurses leaving to work in the UK.

She asks how this is still happening, despite UK government guidelines that were meant to stem the flow of nurses from developing countries.

Agency fees

David Bull looks at how private nursing agencies are tempting disillusioned NHS nurses back onto the wards by offering far better pay and working conditions.

He questions why the NHS is paying out millions of pounds in agency fees whilst nurses continue to leave, complaining of low pay, poor morale and lack of flexible working.