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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 4 Hansard (27 March) . . Page.. 973 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

talking to nurses over the last year, and more particularly in the last few months, I recognise that there is a dangerous situation in the hospital. It is a dangerous situation because we have nurses being asked to work in a totally unacceptable way. This workload has serious and dangerous implications for not only their health but also the health of the people they are caring for.

I have spoken to a number of nurses and have said, "Can you give me your story. Can you tell me what it is that you are experiencing because I need to understand how bad this is." I have heard those stories and they are frightening. I will give you a few examples. One nurse told me that basically she has received calls at 6 am every day to come to work; and that she has been asked to work double shifts, with one request to do 24 hours straight. After a double shift, finishing at 7 am, there was a call from management at 10 am after an hour's sleep to work that afternoon. I was told about "calls during my holidays to come to work (this is the norm, rather than the exception) and calls on my days off to come to work (this is the norm, rather than the exception)".

Another girl reported she had done 14 days straight and the answer to this from management was that the staff are asking to do extra shifts. Other examples are: 100 hours one fortnight, with 40 hours night duty; lists attached to the roster requesting staff to put their names down for extra shifts where there are known gaps; and because the wards can now work out the acuity workload on the ward, albeit the prehistoric system, the patients are often kept in casualty because there is no bed for them on the ward at the time, and this can be for 24 hours.

I was told that patients are required to sleep on hard narrow trolleys in a very noisy environment, sometimes for more than 24 hours; that ward noises include monitors, telephones, pagers, staff and people who are loud and sometimes abusive; and that patients who have stayed in the emergency department for this time can suffer from a variety of medical problems, not limited to elderly patients with dementia, oncology patients and parents with sick children.

I was also told that patients' personal hygiene is not able to be the priority that it should be; that staff are just too busy with new patients to be able to care for these patients appropriately; and that this is very distressing to the nursing staff. Of course, it is also very distressing to patients. Further, due to the backlog of patients in the emergency department, there are frequent times when the three designated resuscitation beds are used for patients with less serious problems. I was informed that "the ramification here is that if a multi-trauma/cardiac arrest patient were to present to the emergency department, we may not have a bed available to treat them. This situation is worsening. We are already seeing large numbers of patients each day-similar numbers to our busiest time in winter. We are all very concerned about the situation."

Now we are hearing from minister Moore, the government, the Labor opposition and everybody else that we have a crisis in nursing-this is not just in the ACT-and that what we have to do is encourage people who are qualified to stay and encourage more people to train to become nurses. The objective is to improve the pay and conditions to attract new nurses. What are we seeing being offered here? We are being told that there is an unacceptable situation in the hospital and we have a proposal from government which gives a pay rise but also alters conditions.

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