Being an EEN in a rural and remote MPS we are all working above and beyond our limits and we are at breaking point.

Some of us leave work after doing an 8 Hr day or sometimes longer feeling extremely overwhelmed because we haven’t been able to give our patients the time and proper care that is needed.

We were under staffed before the pandemic but now the government says that we just need to cope. Well we are not coping. We go home exhausted and very emotional and expected to go back the next day and do it all again.

We miss out on family occasions just so that our patients have someone with them.  It is hard enough for us to answer call bells as well as the telephone but what is very frightening is the amount of patients that need close monitoring for falls or observations that some of these patients do fall or don’t get turned through out the night or god forbid be left in their incontinence pad for longer than 6 hours, it’s just so simple to give us more staff.

Also if you ask any patient they will probably tell you the same story that the nurses are constantly walking very quickly pass all day long and deserve a lot more money for the job that they do, even more so now during this pandemic as we nurses and midwives are constantly thinking am I going to come into contact with Covid-19 or am I going to take it home to our loved ones.

I just wished that we nurses could trade places with our government for at least 2 weeks and see how they go doing what we do, on the amount of money that we get. I bet they wouldn’t even last a day