A nurse at Auckland’s Starship children’s hospital is warning staff shortages are leading to dire consequences.
Some cancer treatments have been delayed by up to seven days at the hospital due to a shortage of nurses but Health New Zealand says it is confident in the quality and safety of care provided.
A nurse, who RNZ has agreed not to name, says staff in her ward were dealing with three patients to one nurse during the week, but nights and weekends were a different story.
“I’ve had five kids on a night shift before, definitely the average on a night is four,” she said.
That was a big concern for the nurse.
“Because of how unwell these kids are and how quickly they can deteriorate, we can’t have four kids to one of us,” she said.
“We cannot give our best version of ourself as a nurse to four kids at once, that’s just impossible.”
The consequences would be neglect and late medication, she said.
“We kind of have to prioritise and go like ‘who is most unwell, and who needs our attention the most?’, when all the kids need our attention, all the kids deserve our version of our best self, on time, at the right time, when they need not when we can because we’ve got too much going on.”
An adult and child look at the Sky Tower from Starship Hospital.
Facebook / Sky Tower
Staffing levels were leading to issues like children not getting their medication on time or at times dosing errors, the nurse said.
“Our roster is getting approved to have three nurses start on a night shift, where we will have 15 kids,” she said.
“That’s where I start to get really worried and I am constantly working in fear because a mistake is bound to happen at some point when I’ve got so many things that I need to get done just on each hour, it’s so easy to miss something.”
Errors like giving late medication were a common occurrence, the nurse said.
“You are aware that you’ve got this medication that’s due at 5pm, but I’m not going to be finished by 5pm, so you have to prioritise your roles and your jobs and go, ‘what is needed first, what is needed second’,” she said.
“These timely medications are being given late to some extent everyday, and that’s just because the workload is too much, that it’s taking too much time.”
The nurse described it as playing catch up.
“Ultimately, it’s the kids that we are failing, and it’s the kids that are being neglected,” the nurse said.
It wasn’t just more nurses that was needed, she said, but experience and specialised training as well.
“I feel we need a change in the whole system but maybe also some perks to going through nursing school like some more funding, paid training, something that will encourage people thinking of doing nursing to actually get up, apply, and go through the training to become a nurse,” she said.
The Starship nurse said the hospital’s cancer ward was losing at least one nurse a month, looking at the situation annually.
“They’re going to other parts of Starship, they’re going to other hospitals to get the same pay and be in a better situation, and fair enough,” she said.
Health New Zealand’s Starship Hospital director, Dr Greg Williams, said Starship has a very low rate of medication error.
Starship Hospital director Dr Greg Williams.
Supplied / Starship Hospital
“We have not had any serious medication errors in Starship recently.”
Williams had earlier said all vacant nursing roles at Starship Hospital’s paediatric haematology and oncology service were recruited for or in the process of being recruited for.
“We are supporting the service with additional staffing including senior staff from the service, and staffing from across Starship and Auckland City Hospital,” he said.
“There is no set number of staff providing support, they are used when and where it’s needed, depending on both planned work and acute changes in workload.”
The number of staff working on a ward at any given time was dynamic, variable, and changed day to day, sometimes even hour by hour, Williams said.