Healthcare workers say they are struggling to care for patients with more than 8,500 medical staff across four states in Covid isolation as Omicron puts added pressure on the system.
In New South Wales, 2,650 healthcare staff are currently in isolation. Another 2,477 are isolating in Queensland, 1,873 in Victoria and 1,557 in Western Australia, according to the latest numbers.
Staff working across the country paint a damning picture of a struggling healthcare system. One nurse in regional WA said she had never seen it so bad, with some patients forced to wait days to be moved out of emergency departments.
“Our emergency department has become everything: it’s the GP centre, it’s the high intensive care unit for the region, it’s become the locked mental health facility, even though it doesn’t have security,” she said.
“Wait times for serious priority one cases can be days and days. They’ll be sitting in ED without anything we can do for them, other than house and feed them because we don’t have the specialist skills.”
The nurse, who was concerned she could lose her job if she was identified, said she was speaking out because the public needed to know how bad the situation has become.
Her regional hospital was not dealing with Covid cases but was struggling because the bigger hospitals in Perth were backlogged. She said dealing with the number of patients being sent to regional hospitals was overwhelming.
Several mental health patients who needed to be in psychiatric wards have had to stay in the emergency department due to a lack of beds, she said.
“That’s a crisis. It’s really cruel to do that to someone. It’s very unsafe, it’s very scary,” she said.
In Melbourne, a nurse who has had Covid twice in four months said the system was buckling due to the staffing pressures.
“Working in hospitals we are so short-staffed, it’s becoming normal to do double shifts, from 16 to 18 hours,” she said.
“People are just getting sick left, right and centre, which is to do with exhaustion.”
She said staff were being placed in wards outside their specialties, increasing the chances for mistakes.
She recently sought help for her burnout via a helpline and was told she should try meditation or take leave.
In regional NSW a doctor said the staffing issues were more acute.
“If you look at my hospital and GP practice there’s issues with having no theatre staff, no emergency medicine trained nurses,” he said.
“Some nurses are doing 12-hour shifts, some are doing double shifts, but you can only do so much and until you get burnt out.”
He said wait times to get into the GP clinic have doubled to four weeks, while hospital patients are left in emergency for several nights when they would normally be transferred within hours.
“For monitoring and managing a patient safely it is better to be in a ward,” he said.
The president of the Rural Doctors Association, Dr Megan Belot, said the surge in influenza and Covid cases weren’t just affecting the major hospitals.
“We’re all dealing with workforce fatigue and strain as we go further into winter, and Covid is running rampant,” Belot said.
“We’re definitely seeing a surge in presentations in general. We’ve got Covid patients back in our [regional] hospitals again”
Belot said the demand on GPs in some locations had driven people to go to emergency departments.
“Or patients are being forced to go to other practices, which if you’re in a bigger town that’s OK, but if you’re in a town with one GP practice, you have to drive 100 kilometres,” she said. “It’s not viable. When you are sick, it’s a real issue.”
State governments are grappling with how to handle this pressure. Victoria’s premier, Daniel Andrews, announced 400 new staff would be recruited under a $162m state government plan to help the sector.
NSW Health said local health districts were addressing the challenge in several ways.
“Including increasing bed capacity in hospitals where possible; ensuring all available clinical staff are deployed to the care areas with the highest demand, and improving the timeliness of discharge for patients,” a spokesperson said.
“In hospital emergency departments, triage is done by a specialised triage nurse as soon as possible after a patient arrives. Patients are allocated a triage category based on the time in which they need medical attention.”
Queensland’s health minister, Yvette D’Ath, said 3% of the state’s health workforce was off work, with triage tents outside emergency departments “working well” to separate those with Covid from other patients.
“We’ve got paramedics actually stationed on those bases to help with the turnaround and we’ve been trialling things like new electronic stretchers that actually change over stretchers,” she said.
“But there is no mistake, the demand is outstripping everything we bring in.”
