Exhausted front-line staff at
Auckland City Hospital have taken the unusual step of writing directly to management to warn of the danger posed by chronic staff shortages in the emergency department.
A formal document earlier this month signed by 150 staff, including doctors, nurses and healthcare assistants, said "safe staffing levels" were "consistently breached", exposing staff and patients to unacceptable risk.
Staff nurse
Nico Woodward - a
Nurses Organisation delegate - said even when the emergency department (ED) and neighbouring clinical decision unit (CDU) were fully staffed, there were still too many patients for them to treat properly.
"We'll go almost weeks without dipping below 100 percent capacity, which even when we're fully staffed, the pressure is immense."
ED staff decided to escalate their concerns in a formal way after repeatedly filing "incident reports" with no tangible result.
"Submitting incident reports don't seem to be doing much other than creating paperwork for us," Woodward said.
"People are missing breaks, they're not able to take leave, we've got higher number of patients we're looking after, multiple sick calls, those sick calls aren't being covered, leaving staff having to pick up the pieces of what's left behind."
RNZ