Triple shifts, going home in tears: WA doctor exposes chronic hospital understaffing and COVID fears (watoday.com.au)
Dear Mr McGowan,
Happy New Year. Did you get to spend some time with your family over the festive break? I didn’t because hospitals don’t stop.
A Perth doctor has written an open letter to WA Premier Mark McGowan warning of chronic understaffing and burnout – as well as fear of an impending COVID wave – at the state’s hospital.CREDIT:NICK WALKER
Falls don’t stop, sepsis doesn’t take a holiday, patients still have strokes and heart attacks and bleed.
Violence and alcohol abuse increases, and more people attempt to take their own lives. Ambulances are ramped, beds are ‘black state’ and flow from ED is non-existent.
I implore you to come and spend a night with us in ED or a day on a ward, and tell us that the hospital system in WA is prepared for COVID.
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No matter how hard you work to convince the general public that you have done all you can to prepare, I can tell you fundamentally, as someone who works in that system every day, that we are not.
That patients are going to die because this system is already overwhelmed, and chronically understaffed, leaving our most vulnerable patients at risk of harm, and our nurses, doctors and allied health staff already burnt out.
I’m not sure of another industry where it is acceptable to be asked to do double or, for some nurses, even triple shifts because there is no one else to call in?
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During the three recent public holidays, I was expected to do my job, and the job of two other doctors, where the priority becomes simply keeping patients alive because the hospital is trying to exist on skeleton staff.
What’s going to happen when we have public holidays and normal patient loads and COVID?
We are constantly bombarded with desperate emails and calls to fill gaps in rosters.
Pay at 2.5 times the normal rate, travel allowances and other incentives are mentioned, but the novelty soon wears off when you are so fatigued, your bones ache and all you want is a day off.
And yet, we keep doing it because we feel we owe it to our patients and our colleagues, to try to keep this train wreck moving forward.
The families of our patients entrust us with their care and yet, each of us are routinely dealing with situations where we are at risk of physical harm, where our patients are at risk of falls and medical restraint because we simply don’t have enough staff on the floor.
Beds? Is that some sick joke? There are none.
You can’t just discharge a patient with dementia to home when they need residential care, or send someone acutely intoxicated home from ED.
I always thought it was a privilege to be a doctor, but in this system, I’m not so sure anymore.
I wonder in how many other industries you go home and cry because you are so concerned about your patients, but there is near nothing you can do to advocate for them when the system is so chronically underfunded, understaffed and under-resourced.
Additionally, we live with the constant fear that if you make a mistake during the weeks in a row that you are rostered to work, that you could be reported to AHPRA, or a family could make a complaint against you.
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I appreciate that being Premier must be difficult, but I doubt you understand the sheer emotional, physical and mental fatigue that comes from being a doctor or nurse, working days on end with little, if no, relief in sight.
I doubt you will ever experience what it is like to palliate a patient, certify a death or tell a family that a resuscitation was unsuccessful.
While we deal with all this, we know the stories of our colleagues from the east coast, and we can viscerally feel the wave of COVID infections coming. You’ve had two years.
You’ve had two terms and what have we got to show for it?
Healthcare is fundamental to the prosperity of this state. Those of us from over east, or from overseas, haven’t seen our families for months, if not years.
And yet, we are still expected to pick up the pieces, and go to work each day, while you tell us that we are prepared. We’re not. We’re done. We’re fatigued.
The thought of having to deal with COVID infections on top of this current mess, leaves us in tears.
Come and walk in our shoes – maybe then, you’ll understand how much the health system of WA has failed, and continues to crumble under the weight of everyday presentations.
Yours sincerely,
An exhausted doctor
