July 7, 2022

Member Stories

Mental health is forgotten in this pandemic 

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The NSW Government has announced funding for small businesses and rebates to NSW households with school-aged children; however, it has failed to invest in our public health system by not implementing safe patient ratios.

Our mental health system has always struggled but it’s been especially felt during this pandemic. Mental health nurses have struggled through the waves of the COVID-19 pandemic and have experienced the same issues as our nursing colleagues in the general hospital public health system.

NSW Mental Health units have reconfigured units to support the admissions of mental health patients with COVID-19, and we continue to have outbreaks within these environments. It’s been quite challenging given the age of some of our inpatient units, which lack respiratory isolation rooms, firmly closed doors, and have poorly ventilated wards and shared patient rooms. Compounding this is the issue of lack of resources available to care for any patient with airborne illness.

Mental health nurses, while highly experienced in caring for a patient with mental health issues, have limited knowledge about caring for patients with complex medical and physical conditions. When staffing is under-resourced, it becomes difficult to deliver safe, quality care.

Staffing has remained under-resourced in mental health units for years; however, this pandemic has immensely exacerbated this issue. Excessive overtime and unfilled shifts leave a trail of exhausted and burnt-out nursing staff, and an overwhelmed system that simply cannot provide safe and adequate patient care.

It’s time for this government to invest in the public health system and implement safe staffing ratios.

Francesca Cavallaro, EN

Want to know why we’re fighting? 

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Imagine being a nurse who earns less than nurses in your bordering states, who for the last two-plus years has dealt with a global pandemic with no more than a “thanks”, a pay freeze, or a slap-in-the-face 0.3 per cent rise.

Imagine knowing that nurses in other states have been given a COVID bonus, and you’re still fighting for the pay rise you should have got two years ago.

Then imagine that your premier and health minister continue to say the system you work for is fine and coping.

Imagine seeing nurses in Victoria offered hospital surge support payments of up to $60 per shift and $300 per week, while NSW nurses are offered a virtual pat on the back.

Imagine knowing that if you worked as an RN7 in Queensland, you could earn an extra $128.10 per week (over $6500 a year more than you currently do).

Imagine being told by your government that thinks your health system is coping that nurse-to-patient ratios don’t work, despite massive evidence to the contrary.

Imagine being told that the 5000 new nurses they employed in 2019 fixed everything, with no regard for the reality that there is not the support for 5000 new grad nurses to be educated and orientated safely into a system that is already broken.

This is why we are fighting. This is why we are striking. This is why we are desperate for our state government to listen to us!

We need safe staffing ratios. We deserve a fair and decent pay rise. We need to be respected. Is it too much to ask for?

Rachel Hughes, EN

NHPPD is manipulated

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The current NHPPD system of staffing levels is not working. This system puts profit over people, it is manipulated, it does not provide appropriate staffing levels, it puts patients’ and nurses’ safety at risk, and it has not addressed major staffing issues in mental health units.

Mental health units are in crisis! Mental health consumers, especially when they are at their most vulnerable, deserve better!

There is inadequate resourcing of public hospital mental health wards. Workloads are unreasonable, and they are unsustainable under the current system. Wards are unsafe.

What will it take for mental health consumers and those who care for them to stop being neglected? What will it take for mental health care to be acknowledged and prioritised? What will it take for the state government to adequately resource public hospital mental health units?

We need mandated nurse-to-patient ratios on all wards across the state, to provide safe patient care.

Nurse-to-patient ratios will improve patient care. Ratios will help nurses working in an already high-demand and high-stress job. Ratios will ensure safe wards, safe workplaces, and reassure families that their loved ones are getting the best possible care.

Nurse-to-patient ratios save lives!

Skye Romer, EN

‘Our families miss us’

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Not only are more patients presenting at our hospitals and our wards and with more pre-existing comorbidities, but more are also acutely unwell. Yet we deal with constant reminders that we are “fully staffed” and gaslit with promises of brighter days.

Yet here we are. We are pushed to:

  • discharge patients to clear our overflowing emergency departments
  • discharge enough patients in time for the day’s elective surgery lists
  • quickly move patients who have passed to the morgue, to bring in the next
  • attend more mandatory education, but expected to squeeze it into our busy shifts, or worse, in our own personal time
  • attend to follow-up phones calls, yet we struggle to give patients personal care.

And if that’s not bad enough, we are harassed daily with calls, messages, and requests for extra or overtime shifts.

Our rostered days off are no longer ours to enjoy, as our personal phones are bombarded with messages of deficits and pleas to assist.

We are called in early and asked to stay late. We are cornered in the hallways to swap shifts, only to see a message that they now need to cover the shift you swapped.

Our kids are going to bed without us. We are missing their lives. Our days off are playing catch-up on housework that was left undone as we ran out the door a few hours earlier than rostered. Or was not done as we slept because we didn’t return home until the morning, after our afternoon shift turned into an 18-hour overnighter.

We squeeze in a catch-up with loved ones here or there. Our social lives no longer fit within our work lives. The balance between life and work has tipped to the latter. Our families miss us.

We lose ourselves as we give more and more of our time.

Our bank accounts don’t show how hard we work, as after so much overtime the government reaches in and takes it back in taxes. All we have to show for our efforts are bags under our eyes, the aches of walking halls for days on end, the hunched shoulders from the weight of unfinished tasks, and the reminders of all the time we have lost.

And yet we are told we are coping.

We are told we are fully staffed and not working short.

We are treated as though we are replaceable, as no incentives are provided to keep staff.

We shoulder the mental load of an underfunded, out of touch, broken system.

Jasmine Moore, EN

Show us some respect, Premier

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 Working in a busy ED, we are no strangers to hectic, fast-paced work environments.

Whatever comes through the doors, we are ready to mobilise and get a team together to deliver excellent patient-centred care and help our communities.

For the past two years, we have been at the frontline of the COVID pandemic, busting our guts to make sure our patients, colleagues and the community are kept safe. Increasingly, we are turning up to shifts two, three or even four staff members short, but having to deliver the same model of care.

We are expected to take unsafe patient loads of six or seven patients because … what other options are there?

Nurses are beyond exhausted. Multiple times in a shift you will find staff broken down, crying, struggling to hold it together.

Every shift there will be at least one person on overtime in the midst of an 18-hour shift.

A recent shift had six staff on overtime! And then, we were short the next day too!

Has Dom Perrottet ever stepped foot in a public hospital, let alone an ED during this crisis?

If the Premier wants us to have a “strong health system”, how about he shows some respect to the staff working in it so that we actually want to stay in our jobs!

Damien Davis Frank, RN

I don’t sleep well at night – scenes from my shifts play in my mind over and over

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For years, we have been campaigning for ratios for patient safety, only for it to fall on the government’s deaf ears.

Long before COVID hit, we often had nursing shortages on shift, poor skill mix, RNs on sick leave replaced by AiNs, and huge amounts of overtime on offer. I don’t know how we managed to get through it and keep our patients safe but we did – but then along came COVID.  We didn’t know what hit us.

Patient numbers swelled and nurses were deployed from each ward to staff COVID units. Staff were exhausted from constantly working overtime, and with the overtime, wards were still short-staffed. We all worried that we would take COVID home to our families too.

I work in the wards, and it is horrendous. I don’t even have time to chat with patients during the course of my shift, to offer them the emotional support that I normally would. All we can do is concentrate on completing all the tasks we must do. I don’t sleep well at night – scenes from my shifts play in my mind over and over.

What we do is bloody hard work, and we still have no real acknowledgement from the government.

We desperately need our ratios NOW, before the next wave hits us. Our residents in Western Sydney deserve better. The residents in NSW deserve better, as do the nurses and midwives.

Christine Boxsell, EN