An emergency nurse at Melbourne’s Alfred Hospital, who asked to stay anonymous, tells Crikey how staff are stretched to the limit and exposed to COVID-19 while working their shifts.
There have been massive breaches in safety. Paramedics are bringing patients in that we later find out have suspected COVID-19 symptoms and by then they’ve been in the waiting room with other patients and I’ve been treating them for three hours, taking blood and vitals and visiting other patients without proper protection.
Clinical judgment is out the window. The situation is absolutely dire; it’s much worse than last year.
We’ve run out of isolation rooms, so patients with lower suspected symptoms of COVID-19 are just put behind a curtain. They should be behind closed doors, but they’re behind curtains. The virus is airborne, and it’s putting us and other patients at risk.
We had a patient walk around the ward without a mask on and it wasn’t shut down for deep cleaning.
Another patient who later tested positive for COVID-19 was in the waiting room for hours wearing just a surgical mask. The waiting room wasn’t shut down for cleaning and staff weren’t furloughed because the hospitals thought our goggles and masks would be enough. They checked the CCTV footage to see who had been in close contact with the person, but the whole department should have been isolated.
If there’s a COVID-19 positive case brought in from hotel quarantine, hallways are cleared, there’s a marshall making sure everyone is wearing personal protective equipment and the doctor does some of the nurses’ jobs to limit staff exposure. But for the waiting room, the hospital has cut corners.
I only just got fitted for my N95 mask a few months ago. The mask I had been wearing last year only offered 10% protection; the hospital requires the masks to fit to provide 200% protection.
There’s been an increase of mental health presentations who have self-harmed, saying they just can’t handle the risk of COVID-19 or lockdowns anymore. I’ve worked in the emergency department for years and I’ve never seen it this bad.
We’re seven to eight nurses down each shift due to possible exposure to the virus, and 170 nurses down for the fortnight. We can use pull staff — staff who have been reassigned from other wards — but that’s not ideal as they’re not trained for emergencies. We have to be fully vaccinated to work in the ICU or in the emergency department so staff who can’t or won’t get vaccinated have been redeployed to other areas of the hospital.
So emergency nurses are taking on extra shifts because it comes down to patient safety, and nurses want to support their patients. I’ve worked several double shifts, which can be 18 hours long, and by the end your head is on the table. I don’t believe the best quality of care could be happening in those situations.
Staff morale is horrendous, everyone is overworked and exhausted and absolutely foul. It’s crazy, it’s challenging, and the risks just spiral.
A spokesperson for Alfred Hospital told Crikey there were strict protocols in place to keep staff and patients as safe as possible in the emergency department.
“Patients who come to the emergency department are screened by a streaming nurse on arrival [which] occurs prior to being seated in the waiting area, and includes a series of checks relating to any symptoms an individual may experience, which are related to COVID, or attendance at known exposure sites,” the spokesperson said. “If any risk is identified through the screening process, the patient is immediately isolated.
“Our staff are working hard to maintain a safe environment for all patients, while we continue to provide care for our community at this challenging time.”
All hospital-and ambulance-systems in Australia are suffering from a more or less bipartisan policy of “doing more with less”. An abstract economic model told them about and ideal economic world in which nearly all services were provided by private providers and that government would be small. For reasons that are akin to those behind religious faiths, which seemed “scientific” because lots of maths was used in modelling the “ideal economy,”these politicians set about making government small, with an article of faith being that increasing spending in areas other than defence was “unsustainable. The result has been a Federal Government that cannot do anything-perhaps not even defence-well and which, together with states committed to saving money and not to delivery of the best services, has made our hospital system vulnerable, delaying and hampering timely medical treatment and delivering increasingly sub par education in schools, so that we have a crisis even when the pandemic is on a relatively small scale. The economic religion that government and the bureaucracy worship has to be overthrown.
Ian, I could not agree with you more!!
The economic Taliban that are responsible for this hideous state of affairs in our hospitals (schools, universities and myriad other places) has much to answer for. The only thing that the bean-counting maggots want to see increased is the size of their bonuses for ‘cutting costs’.
The situation was bad enough before COVID, now it is diabolical and only going to get much, much worse.
Radical right libertarian policies now accepted as the norm or status quo under the guise of efficiencies and economising in the PS e.g. health care facing ageing population requiring more services, then to save budget expenditure which leads to ineffective or lower service levels, always backgrounded by talk of a need for ‘tax cuts’ (when Australia has low taxes compared with developed world) and ‘Laffable’ trickle down effect; Disneyland.
The worst example is apparently how polling shows majority agree something needs to be done about environmental issues, but that inverts when a modest cost is attached….
I find it interesting (but not surprising) that the supporters of the ‘let it rip’ approach to this virus are conspicuous by their absence (so far at least) in this discussion.
Can I respectively invite the anonymous person who responded negatively to my post to write a reason or reasons for that reply I would like to be enlightened on the error of my ways? Of course I would not expect you to use your real name, just the usual pseudonym would be fine.
Someone’s got it in for you Robert Reynolds! you had minuses to both your comments, and I haven’t a clue as to why! I liked them both, and that’s taken the counter back to zero. If only correcting the Covid curve was as easy! 🙂
Many thanks for you kind comments Glenn. They are much appreciated!
(Just between you and I Glenn, I am used to some people having it in for me. That is just part of the game.)
Cheers,
Rob
They are unable to comment Robert because you cannot plausibly deny the hospital and paramedic crises, but still vitriolic enough to do a sneaky downvote….good luck to them.
I will not be taking much advantage of my new-found double vax freedoms until we are well past 80% of the total population double-vaxxed.
All too often it is forgotten real people have to do the job, not robots, or paper targets. Covid has not only laid bare the failings of governments, but also laid bare the impotence of managers and politicians of all sides. Many come straight from university with a small stint in working life, and then think they can implement modelling the way they were taught. Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. Career politicians are detrimental to society, they should have 2 or 3 terms at the most in parliamentary life. Most ministers don’t even know the field they have to serve. Yes, serve, not dictate. To me, it’s as clear as that all career politicians who are their whole life in parliament should be sacked, there is no good coming from them. Not publicizing information, and withholding it to only be informed through FOI requests should be an offence. Australia is on a slippery slope where lies are written as truths.
The notion that someone without experience in the real world could have anything to contribute in Parliament is an insult to the electorate.
(NB ‘real world’ would NOT include being a staffer of an incumbent.)
As for those time servers, lobby fodder & career seat polishers I commend the words of Cromwell (Oliver not Thomas – though the latter had more nouse than the total on the wrigglers in the Hole-in-the-Hill) to the Rump Parliament “You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately … In the name of God, go!”
Gladys Berjiklian, Scott Morrison and Brad Hazzard have enabled 43,436 people in NSW to contract covid and are living with it – or maybe dying – or getting long covid and struggling to live – and is the tip of the iceberg as that number relates only to those who have been tested. Meanwhile the woman Berjiklian who gave the nation the first covid wave of infections and deaths, and has followed up this year with an even more startling achievement, including sending it across the Tasman to NZ, has now refused to give any press conferences on the progress of her deadly disease.
A bit of figure fudging NSW Coalition style and hey presto doesn’t look as bad
active cases have roughly halved to 14,510 after the government seemingly changed the definition
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2021/09/sydneysiders-party-on-the-beach-as-nsw-records-1262-new-covid-cases/