Kathy Triggell, RN, Wyong Hospital
We’ve met with our local member David Harris, the member for Wyong.
We put forward how awful the nursing hours per patient day (NHPPD) are and informed him that in a three-week period in August our local health district was 5,000 hours short: that is 625 shifts not provided in our local health district between Wyong and Gosford in a three-week period.
He said he understood that we were short staffed, that there were difficulties trying to employ nurses in our area, and that he had spoken to the Local Health District.
He wasn’t supportive of the 15 per cent pay rise: he said that was too much, and that we hadn’t mentioned it previously and all of a sudden now we are trying to get this percentage which isn’t in their budget.
I said to him, ‘I can’t understand why Queensland and Victoria can pay their nurses appropriately and we can’t’. He said: ‘We are up to our eyes in debt’.
We just looked at him. They found the money in those states, so they can surely find it in NSW.
We need our local politicians to stand up and back us. We were the ones that stood behind them when they wanted to be elected.
I expect them to look after their community.
People are very angry about the whole treatment of nurses, and the community support is fantastic.
We have been out at the train stations, we have been at markets, we have been putting flyers in letter boxes all down the coast.
Usually, the response from the community is that we deserve this and the government should pay up.
We have a lot of nurses who are leaving, who have changed careers, and who are not far off retiring. And we have a lot of young nurses that come out of university after three-and-a-half years of study, and they end up with a job that won’t pay the rent. And they have a HECS bill and the cost of living has soared.
If the government won’t give nurses the pay rise they deserve, we are heading for a catastrophe in the health system.
There is a great camaraderie between nurses. We do back each other: that is half of the problem. Nurses are doing overtime and extra shifts because they don’t want to leave their colleagues in a situation where their workload is so heavy.