STAFF working on the mental health wards of Steeton's Airedale Hospital are experiencing one incident of violence a day.

These are average figures released in a report by Airedale NHS Trust's personnel director Roger Pollard.

He says staff are facing an increasing level of violent incidents and now mental health bosses are putting together an action plan to try and tackle the problem.

This is just one of the issues the hospital trust is looking at after being given Government targets. Others include implementing measures to make sure the trust holds onto its staff longer and working towards a workforce which is more representative of the area it serves, in terms of ethnic groups.

At Wednesday's meeting of the Airedale NHS Trust board, Mr Pollard said these improvements were on-going.

Stephen Fowler, chairman of the hospital's staff liaison committee, said he believed changes need to be made in the recruitment of nurses so staff remained happy.

"Until we do something about the pay rates for nurses I don't think we'll retain them," he said.

Airedale's nursing director Susan Franks added that the hospital did extremely well at retaining staff.

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