Nurses warn of severe understaffing at Western Sydney neonatal intensive care unit.

Tiny lives deserve safe care was the theme of a rally by nurses at Nepean Hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), which cares for some of the state’s sickest babies.

The rally called for more staff to ensure safe staff to patient ratios for sick and preterm babies.

Nepean Hospital is located at Kingswood in western Sydney and its NICU receives sick babies from all over NSW.

The hospital’s NSWNMA branch organised the protest, which members attended in their own time. Some came into the rally on their day off while others had just finished a long shift.

As of July 2025, the hospital was funded for 38 beds in the NICU. They included 25 special care nursery beds and 13 intensive care beds.

However, patient numbers often exceed funded bed capacity.

“These are the most vulnerable patients in the health system – tiny, sick and pre-term babies who don’t have a voice and are reliant on their caregivers for all their daily needs,” said Branch Secretary and Delegate Alicia Rodgers.

“Often, they’re as sick as adult intensive care patients, but they don’t get the same level of safe staffing as their adult counterparts.

“The state government has agreed to roll out minimum staffing ratios of one-to-one care to adult ICUs but not NICUs.

“At Nepean NICU we absolutely strive to give our sickest babies 1 to 1 care. However, staff and/or patient numbers don’t always guarantee that level of care.

“We are seeking a government commitment so that its guaranteed that we can nurse the most critically ill patients on a one-to-one basis.”

Families need care too

Alicia said NICU patients receive similar levels of medical care as adult ICU patients and have additional needs such as neurodevelopmental care for very pre-term babies.

“We also provide care to entire families; for example, we support them to care for their preterm babies and we provide breastfeeding support,” she said.

“In order to meet these demands, we desperately need more staff to stop the reliance on overtime, extra shifts and deployed staff from other units.

“Constantly surging beyond our funded intensive care beds and our overall bed capacity within the NICU and special care nursery really stretches our ability to be able to provide the safest and most effective care to our most vulnerable patients.

“The neonatal unit is funded for 38 beds but we sometimes surge up to 43 beds. We might have between 14 to 16 staff on the floor for that many patients.”

Alicia said nurses enthusiastically supported the Nepean Hospital rally and hoped that a government promise to increase staffing at Westmead NICU would lead to a similar commitment for Nepean NICU.

“There is a real sense of anticipation at Nepean as to what our action might be able to achieve for us given the result at Westmead.”