Hospital chiefs are confident they have met staffing targets set in a watchdog’s warning notice.

Bradford Royal Infirmary was inspected by the Care Quality Commission in September and October last year and its bosses were subsequently told they needed to recruit more staff.

Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which runs BRI, was working on improving staffing before the surprise CQC visits and today said it had recruited 161 staff, including 98 nurses.

The Trust had been working towards a March deadline to conform to the CQC’s warning notice which said improvements must be made to meet national standards of quality and safety.

The CQC’s inspection report said the Trust failed to meet national standards in four of six areas looked at including respecting and involving people who use services, the care and welfare of people who use services and assessing and monitoring the quality of service provision. BRI met standards for dealing with complaints and the management of medicine.

But the CQC said the staffing problems were its most significant findings with shortages across “a number of wards and departments, particularly in the Accident and Emergency Department.”

Chief Nurse Juliette Greenwood said: “We have been working very hard to increase staffing levels and maintain the work that was already going on throughout Bradford Teaching Hospitals before last year’s CQC visit.

“We have implemented new systems to track staffing levels, hosted a recruitment fair to attract new nursing staff to the city’s hospitals and we will continue to sustain this ongoing recruitment drive to fill vacant and newly established posts.

“Substantial focus on recruitment has enabled us to appoint three new A&E consultants, one medical admissions unit consultant, 98 nurses and 59 healthcare assistants. We will continue to streamline our recruitment processes, develop new roles and support staff working with us.

“We would like to thank all our staff for their hard work and efforts on a daily basis to provide ongoing high quality care and ensure that patients are at the centre of everything that we do.

“We would like to reassure patients that our focus on recruiting and retaining our staff will continue to be a priority as we strive to maintain an appropriate workforce to meet our patients’ needs.”

The CQC will make another, unannounced, inspection to follow-up on concerns raised in its report, which was released in January.