Nurses warn of Covid crisis
Open letter to New South Wales Premier says hospital ICUs under-staffed and unprepared for surge in cases
Hundreds of ICU nurses across New South Wales have signed an open letter to Premier Gladys Berejiklian warning the hospital system is “in crisis” and demanding the standard ratio of one nurse to each patient in ICU be guaranteed.
The warning follows confirmation that NSW hospitals may be forced to set up makeshift ICU wards in surgical operating theatres and require staff to care for more than one ICU patient at a time.
The number of Covid-19 patients in ICUs is expected to triple in the coming weeks.
When the overall number of ICU patients, including both Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 patients, reaches more than 926, NSW Health has confirmed
it will declare a “Code Black” that signals “demand for critical care services significantly exceeds organisation wide capacity”.
But in an open letter to Berejiklian, hundreds of nurses have pleaded with the government not to abandon the standard ratio of one nurse to every ventilated patient.
“Given the chronic unsafe staffing conditions, exacerbated by Covid-19, we cannot deliver the care you expect us to provide and the level of critical care our patients rightly deserve,” the letter warns.
“We are extremely concerned about our ability to provide safe nursing care under the current staffing levels afforded by the NSW government to ICUs around this state.
“We urge you and your government to urgently fix the ICU staffing crisis. It cannot wait.”
The letter from ICU nurses follows the Premier’s repeated claims that the system is under pressure but can withstand the surge.
On Monday, the NSW government released parts of new modelling by Melbourne’s Burnet Institute which predicts hospitalisations will peak at more than 3400 in October.
The Burnet Institute’s Professor Margaret Hellard confirmed that she had prepared predictions on the statewide peak of cases but it was up to NSW Health to release it in full.
However, NSW Health confirmed late on Monday night that it would
not be making all of the taxpayerfunded modelling public, including the prediction on the statewide peak of daily cases.
The modelling the NSW government is prepared to release predicts a peak in daily case numbers at 2000 a day but only in local government areas of concern. It does not say how many cases there will be across the state at the peak.