Nurses are being forced to ruffle through boxes dumped on the floors of wards at South East Regional Hospital looking for supplies used to care for patients.
That’s the claim this morning from the NSW Nurses and Midwives Association concerned they are now being forced to do the work of non-clinical staff due to short staffing.
Bega Branch President Diane Liang said timely patient care is being compromised.
“The other day I came in and there was boxes everywhere on surgical floor and I was advised that just because the storemen has gone on long service leave, well-deserved, well-deserved, and normally they do an amazing job,” Ms Laing said.
“Bad luck nurses will have to unpack the boxes and there would have been at least 20 boxes that we have to put away,” she said.
“I was angry. I’m not angry at the person going on holidays. I’m angry that the management do not replace adequately, storm in and Allied health when they go on leave. It’s expected that nurses will pick up the slack and we don’t. This job is not to unpack boxes.
“Because they’re short staffed, he can’t do everything. So he said, I’m leaving them there for you guys, and bad luck it’ll happen for over the next 3 weeks because we don’t have the staff to do it.”
The nurses union said their members are being forced to rummage through boxes to find medical consumables on the surgical ward to treat their patients.
“If the ones that we’re looking for are not in the actual stores, in the baskets where they put the new stores, then yes, we do. We were short, some things, we were short, cannulas and we were short, sharps containers. So the girls started to go through the boxes to find some of those items,” Ms Laing said.
“Every minute that we spend doing non-clinical jobs like this it takes away from my patient care, which is why nurses are not supposed to be doing stores jobs,” she said.
Management and whoever’s managing the storage department should have replaced them adequately when someone goes on long service or annual leave. Those guys do an amazing job and it’s not their responsibility to find a replacement. They are aware of it because I did send a letter to the temporary nurse unit don and the deputy don and they have acknowledged it’s not a nurse’s duty and nurse’s job. So we’ll wait and see what happens.”
Nurses are being urged not to unpack boxes to avoid what the union has labelled ‘task creep’.
“We call it Task Creep. If we start accepting and doing this, it’ll eventually become a job that we will have to do and we don’t want that,” shew said.
“That’s why I’m really asking my members to not do the job of putting them away because otherwise it’ll become a job that we have to do.”
We have asked Southern NSW Local Health District for a response.
