Won’t tolerate ‘two tier’ health system

Nurses, like other working people, need money to pay their bills and take care of their families – yet members have chosen to prioritise more nurses over more pay for our 2013 public health system campaign, writes the NSW Nurses & Midwives’ Association.

The reason most of us took on nursing or midwifery as our profession was because we put patient safety and the care of our patients above all else.

It’s what we signed up for. How well we care for the patients on our wards and in the community is how we judge ourselves.

I know you can’t do it properly when there are not enough nurses or midwives for the patients in your care.

Many nurses run all shifts from one person to another to another, to care for those waiting for pain relief, or to change position, or for a bedpan, or for more complex care.

These are people in distress, who don’t understand why you’ve taken so long to get to them. Similarly, your community patients are often left to wait for care in their own homes, or in crowded community health centres, simply because there is not enough time.

It’s intolerable. It’s intolerable for them and intolerable for us. And we won’t tolerate it anymore.

Patients are waiting too long because the government has been told it is okay to have a regime where some wards in some hospitals have improved nurse to patient ratios while the rest do not.

We won improvements in 2011 and now it is time for the O’Farrell government to extend those improvements right across New South Wales.

A two tier system where nurses are supported and staffed to provide first rate care in some hospitals, mainly in the cities, while their colleagues in others, mainly rural areas, are not, is unacceptable. Nurses in country hospitals cannot physically provide the same level of care to patients with the same illness as their city colleagues.

It makes country nurses despair, and it makes them want to leave because they can’t bear being unable to provide care to a standard Australians are entitled to expect. Thankfully, most haven’t left yet, but we need to give them the support that better ratios can provide.

I am proud of the position taken by nurses and midwives in this campaign. When the government threw its paltry 2.5% offer on the table, other public sector workers told them what to do with it and went to the High Court to contest it. It’s easy to understand why.

NSW nurses have taken another route. And that is, to send the state government a message that we simply must have enough nurses and midwives to give all patients, in all wards, in all hospitals, the same world class care they now get in just some hospitals.

Barry O’Farrell – give us that. Give us enough nurses to do our jobs in hospitals and in the community and fulfill our vocation of caring for our sick and injured fellow citizens. Give us that and give it to us in writing so that it is guaranteed.