[[Rosentreter: We are exhausted. Last night was brutal. We literally hit capacity … Just holding on. None of us have ever faced anything like it. Nothing in our studies ever prepared us for this, and not even the most experienced of us have ever seen anything like it.
Fitz: I gather with COVID patients the care needs to be extraordinarily intensive, even by the standards of Intensive Care?
Rosentreter: Like nothing else. The patients are air-hungry, starving for breath. Just to turn a patient over, from on their back to on their stomach – which is something we must do regularly – and keep them breathing, needs six nurses. And we simply don’t have enough of us. We are on the edge right now, with nurses who sign on for eight-hour shifts, leaving after 12 and 14 hours!
Fitz: You sound angry at the lack of resources?
Rosentreter: We are. We have been trying to warn the government for a year. We need more nurses! They boast about the ventilators they’ve now got, but ventilators without nurses are useless. And in recent times we have lost a lot of highly trained nurses to working in the vaccination hubs. Those hubs are important, but the actual vaccinations don’t require the high level of skills that a lot of those nurses have. We need them back.
Fitz: Given how tightly stretched you all are, is it hard to see commentators and politicians say “COVID is no worse than a bad flu”?
Rosentreter: I am super cranky. We all are. People who say that simply have no idea. And there is no excuse for them saying that. How can they? We discuss them with disbelief. Beyond that, we feel disrespected. We are working around the clock to keep people alive, and they are comparing it to the flu?]]
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An exert from within a wider interview with a senior ICU nurse in a Sydney Metropolitan Hospital … you can find the article by googling “Nothing in our studies ever prepared us for this: A nurse on Sydney’s front line tells it like it is”.
