We’re tired, frustrated, .... we just want to care for patients in safety

A nurse in a hospital ward on the frontline of the fight against Covid-19 speaks to

Claire Scott about the challenging reality of life as a healthcare worker

I’M A nurse in a Covid-19 ward in a large Irish hospital. It could be considered a ‘stepdown ward’, in that some patients are coming to the end of their life, but some will hopefully return home or to their nursing homes after recovering. This appears to be standard practice throughout hospitals countrywide.

It’s extremely heavy work. When I say ‘heavy’, I mean that the patient requires the assistance of two people for a lot of their care. The majority of the patients on our ward would rely on oxygen therapy to maintain a good level of oxygen saturation within the body. Some would still have a cough and a lot would have regular episodes of high temperatures.

At present, the biggest issue we have is that we feel senior management and the hospital aren’t giving the staff the consistent level of support that is required.

We’re in a global pandemic, the first of its kind in our lifetime, and our ward is at full capacity in comparison to many others that aren’t. Despite this, we’re regularly expected to operate without a full complement of staff.

There are wards that are known as ‘protected wards’ in every hospital, which means they cannot be short-staffed due to their patients’ needs. Intensive care units would be an example of this.

But not only are we barely operating within a normal level of staffing which would have been standard pre-pandemic, we’re even more often attempting to operate below that staffing level. There is also inconsistency in relation to personal protective equipment.

We do get our daily ‘rations’ of PPE but sometimes we have to fight for it. Locals have been incredible with their donations of goggles and visors to our ward, and we can’t express our thanks enough.

A lot of the PPE that we received from the HSE was not up to standard – easily ripped and porous, offering essentially no protection.

At one point, it got to the stage where we simply refused to offer care to our patients without the adequate PPE, which seemed to resolve the issues around getting enough PPE for our day’s work.

But why did we have to have that argument in the first place?

It was insulting to speak to us as nurses and healthcare staff and say, ‘Why do you need more?’ ‘We gave you plenty’ or ‘You’re using too much.’

We now have to try to restrict our movement into the patient bays and rooms strategically, purely to conserve PPE.

The idea of prioritising patient care has now been switched to – ‘prioritise the use of your PPE and try and make that work within your scope of nursing care’. It turns my stomach.

In all my years of nursing in so many different environments, morale on our ward is at a serious low.

Yet, we come in every day (some days for free thanks to The Lansdowne Road pay agreement) and do our utmost to work together and get through the day for one reason – our patients.

But the current situation is simply not sustainable. Staff call in sick when they’re not sick, because of the feeling that the support from above simply isn’t there. If we knew we would be fully supported and they had a full team behind us it would be so much easier to go in every day. But this daily rollercoaster of staffing levels can’t continue. Is it really that difficult a question to answer from the hospital and this Government? Why are we being expected to operate as normal? Why aren’t we protected? As if nothing has happened, as if it’s an ordinary day. Because it’s not an ordinary day. We can’t even get support from tech if our equipment stops working because ‘they can’t come up to that ward’.

Should we question ourselves as nurses? Always bailing each other out and helping when we should have gone home over an hour ago, or picking up the extra work because we have no other choice?

Is it because hospital management just assume, ‘Ah, they’ll get through it they always do.’ The problem with this is when we come to work, it’s our professional registration on the line.

We work within one of the most important wards in the hospital and it feels like they’re doing us a favour when they send us an extra pair of hands on the days that we’re short. They have closed other wards in the hospital to cater for a potential influx of patients, and those staff have been redeployed but our ward isn’t seeing those staff. We see the odd one every other day but that’s it.

There’s no communication. Our ward just became a Covid ward. It just happened – no discussions, no information.

No one asked how they could make this work effectively. It’s insulting and disrespectful. The people making these decisions sit behind desks and don’t see the patient. They don’t think to ask the people on the ground who are frontline. It’s not just a communication barrier, communication doesn’t exist.

We’re tired. We’re frustrated. All we want to do is look after our patients safely. Is that really such a big ask?

A lot of the PPE that we received from the HSE was not up to standard – easily ripped and porous, offering essentially no protection