Today I learned that my ward is gaining more beds. We will be taking more acute patients and having higher throughput. After a letter writing campaign initiated by myself, the ward sister and another senior staff nurse a letter was received by management. "We are sorry to hear of your staffing issues. You will be getting extra staff in the form of .5 of an auxillary. By our calculations this will bring you to a full complement of staff".
What. The. Fuck.
We are losing two HCA's. This leaves us with two HCA's in total on the duty roster. The other care assistants are all inexperienced apprentices and auxillaries. I know of 4 HCA's who want jobs on my ward. They have been turned away.
Management has taken the only room on the ward that we have for lunch breaks and handover and are turning it into a patient sideroom. This leaves us cramped into a very small space for handover.
The day staff had to sit on the floor while the night nurse who had been on duty for over 14 hours had to sit precariously on a wobbly ledge thing for the change of shift handover. It takes a half an hour at least to handover. Talk about uncomfortable. If we handover at the nurse's station patients will overhear us and report us for "breaching their privacy".
Breaks are impossible. The staff nurse really isn't in a position to leave the ward for a 15 minute walk to the canteen due to short staffing. She won't have another nurse to watch her patients. She will not be able to eat in the cramped handover room from hell unless she sits on the floor and wants to get interrupted every 2 seconds. That means the staff nurse's only option is to eat at the nurse's station thus inviting a whole bunch of smart ass comments from visitors and doctors who do not realise that she is only taking 10 minutes to eat in a 12 hour shift. Nor do they realise that she has no where to go to eat.
Then I come home from work and see this shit.
What the hell is going on?
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