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"They go home crying" - Nurses under intense emotional strain at Ireland's most overcrowded hospital

Nurses at Ireland's most overcrowded hospital are facing such severe levels of stress and emotion...
Newstalk
Newstalk

16.06 18 Aug 2015


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"They go home crying&a...

"They go home crying" - Nurses under intense emotional strain at Ireland's most overcrowded hospital

Newstalk
Newstalk

16.06 18 Aug 2015


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Nurses at Ireland's most overcrowded hospital are facing such severe levels of stress and emotional strain that many are unable to sleep and often leave work in tears, according to union officials.

Tony Fitzpatrick, Industrial relations Officer for the North East with the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, has told Newstalk that he has spoken to several staff members at Our Lady of Lourdes hospital, Drogheda, who have discussed the emotional toll the work is taking on them, with many of the staff now undergoing resilience training to help them cope.

“Everything is stressful for [nurses] ... they go home crying, several have told me on the drive home in the car they have tears running down their faces [and] they then can’t sleep at night still thinking about the patients, still thinking about their colleagues at work.

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“They know that it’s been impossible for them on that day to deliver quality care for patients.”

Overcrowded wards and corridors and severe staff shortages have made working conditions extremely difficult for staff, Mr Fitzpatrick says.

“Patients are on corridors head-to-toe, there’s cubicles where there should be one patient there’s two.

“[Nurses] even have difficulty opening cupboards to get supplies, IV fluids, drugs etc. - because of trolleys on the corridor.”

“But they still dust off, they come in the next day etc and they try to do their work, they don’t get their breaks. It just is completely unacceptable,” Mr Fitzpatrick told Newstalk as part of the “Your Hospital, Your Health” series.

Staffing shortages

Drogheda hospital serves patients in Louth, Meath, Cavan, Monaghan and north Dublin. The wide geographic spread places the facility under immense strain. It is currently Ireland’s most overcrowded, with 769 patients above capacity in July of 2015.

Plans for a new regional hospital in Navan were put on hold in 2009, however this was not before cut-backs to smaller hospitals around the region. The new hospital in Navan was to cover the care that would be lost with these cut-backs, but since plans were indefinitely shelved there has been increased pressure on Our Lady of Lourdes, Drogheda to cover the shortfall.

Compounding the issues of a wide geographic spread and overcrowding is that the hospital finds itself unable to properly staff nursing shifts.

Despite spending more than any other hospital on agency staff there remains a critical shortfall in staff numbers.

Figures seen by The Pat Kenny Show outline the scale of the problem. In March of this year the minimum number of staff required – ranging from 11-15 nurses, depending on the patient numbers – was only reached once, on March 1st. The INMO says 35% of staff requests are not being met. 

“If you take a particular shift when there should have been 16 nurses looking after that quantum of patients there was only 50% - eight nurses doing the job that 16 should have been doing,” Mr Fitzpatrick said.

Listen to the full report on Our Lady of Lourdes, Drogheda – including the interview with Tony Fitzpatrick – via the player below


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