“We are calling for help before it is too late. This is unsustainable.”
A senior nurse at Antrim Hospital emergency department has written a letter highlighting the “horrendous conditions” they work in alongside the physical and emotional impact every shift has on her and her colleagues.
In her letter, the nurse says that she and her colleagues are close to breaking down in tears regularly throughout their shifts, while some do due to the mental toll working in the emergency department can have, saying it is like working in the trenches in World War One.
She says patients, including those who are elderly and frail, are waiting 18 hours or more to be admitted and provided with a bed while they do not have enough staff to deal with the constant flow of new patients through the doors.
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She described one shift at Antrim Hospital emergency department on September 15, saying “this has not been written to point blame, this has not been written in a competitive manner to other staff or depts. It’s just how overwhelmed I feel working as a nurse on an extremely overcrowded corridor”.
The nurse says that at the beginning of her 13 hour shift, she and the rest of her team are in a good mood and “chirpy” but by the end they felt like they were broken.
As soon as they started there were over 20 patients, the majority over 70 years old, who were waiting to be admitted and some had been sitting on “hard waiting area chairs” for 18 hours or more. At one point there were 76 patients with just eight nurses able to provide care.
She describes one incident that took an emotional toll on her and her colleagues as they had to choose between giving a frail elderly man who was not able to cope on the waiting rooms chairs, but had been there for six hours, a bed over someone who was also elderly but more physically able one as they had been there 28 hours.
This decision left one of the nurses in tears, with the senior nurse saying it was heartbreaking to see this happen to such a good nurse, knowing that the emotions came from wanting to help her patients and not her lacking an ability to do her job.
The nurse says that she is constantly on her feet throughout the shift and she and her colleagues are always worried about making a mistake as they often cannot finish tasks due to interruptions. This could be patients being sick or people worried about family members and while the nurses understand the concerns, it adds to their already stressful working conditions.
She says that the only opportunity she has in her shift to sit down is for five minutes when she does so on the toilet and she needs to take ibuprofen to ensure she is able to finish her shift due to leg pain from working on her feet all day.
The nurse said: “It feels like a war zone. It distresses me that we are left to battle this on our own. At least that is how it feels. I know there is work going on in the background, I understand that, but working on the frontline with these patients in front of you, seeing them suffer, knowing them as people, not just a name on a piece of paper awaiting a bed, is soul destroying.”
She continued: “We are calling for help before it is too late. This is unsustainable. It has been well researched the effects of long term stress on the body and again especially in females, it can manifest itself in autoimmune diseases. We are potentially making more patients for an already broken health service.
“My heart is broken for the Emergency Dept. I love my job, I love caring for patients, I love my work family, but this is not sustainable for any of us, and it gets worse daily.”
The nurse said that it can be difficult for emergency department staff to see other departments that are not as busy or have restrictions on the numbers of patients they deal with at any one time when they can feel like they are “drowning”.
It is understood that the letter from the nurse has been sent to senior management within the Northern Trust.
A Northern Trust spokesperson said: “The pressures facing our health and social care system are unprecedented and the challenges for staff are well documented. We recognise that colleagues are concerned about their ability to provide timely and compassionate care due to the high number of patients in our Emergency Departments who are waiting for admission to an inpatient bed.
“We want our staff to feel able to talk openly about their experiences in the workplace and welcome all feedback as it enables us to support staff, and also identify areas where we need to take action.
“Our Emergency Departments are regularly operating above their capacity, due in large part to a greater demand for beds than are available.
“A programme board has been established by the Trust’s senior management team to prioritise actions to alleviate current pressures and to reduce the overcrowding in our Emergency Departments.”
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