A NHS nurse who plans to walk out says she is unable to cope with ‘soul destroying’ working conditions.
Susan, giving a fake name, has decided that ‘enough is enough’ after dodging punches from patients on a daily basis and being put under ‘too much pressure’.
Mentally ill patients placed on the palliative care ward, short staffing, physical abuse from patients and mistakes with medication were just some of the factors that lead her to breaking point.
Speaking to the Daily Record , she revealed the factors that lead her to quit.
She said: "I had got to the point where I was given so much responsibility as a junior nurse and I felt it was too unsafe so I have decided that enough is enough.
"We are getting a lot of patients in acute general wards who are unstable. They are more suited to psychiatric wards but the trouble is they have cut beds.
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"I have been punched and pushed about and you get verbal aggression towards you. I was punched when I hadn’t long started.
"They throw anything that is at hand. They pick up chairs and try to throw them. When I was last on shift, there were seven out of 24 patients on my ward with mental health issues – two of them violent."
She said clinical support workers are assigned to violent patients but if their condition gets too bad, a mental health nurse has to be brought in – usually from an agency – costing up to £2,000 per patient per day.
Susan, who has been a nurse for just two years and is in her 40s, said that some mental health patients are in general wards for ‘ages’ before being placed in appropriate locations.
She said: “On my last shift, we had three who had been there from three months to a year. They are medically fit but can’t just be discharged.
“They are alongside palliative patients, who are not getting the dignity, peace and quiet to die in peace. The nurses and doctors try their best to accommodate everybody but the NHS is in crisis.”
And while she remains “passionate” about the work she does, Susan can no longer handle the responsibilities.
She has witnessed mistakes made with medication because of the inexperience of newly qualified staff.
She said: “I have seen medication errors being made with drugs you have to sign out, like morphine-based ones or stronger analgesia.
“If it’s two new nurses working on shift together, which shouldn’t happen but it does, they don’t have the experience to know the differences between quick acting and long acting drugs and it is very easy to get them mixed up. Some mistakes have been quite serious but they have managed to get to them in time.”
But she said drug runs are constantly interrupted.
She said: "We used to wear a red tabard which said, ‘Do not disturb – drug round in progress’ but they took them away because the tabards weren’t getting washed so there were infection control concerns.
"Now there is nothing in place to say to a family member, ‘Please don’t interrupt this nurse doing her drug rounds’.”
Instead of working to an NHS contract, Susan will resign this month and take on nurse bank work where she will be able to pick her hours, won’t have to do overtime and will not be put in charge of a ward.
Susan, who works on a general medical ward, said after qualifying there wasn’t much support for new nurses.
She added: “I was basically put in on my first shift, handed my keys and that was it. It was a case of sink or swim. I was lucky I was able to keep my head above water but there is an awful lot of pressure.
“The other nurses I worked alongside were absolutely amazing but they don’t have time to help newly qualified nurses so it was a struggle.”
One ward is set to get five new nurses, but Susan said: “To me that is a safety issue because they don’t have the skill mix to put on the rota – where there are more skilled nurses working alongside the junior nurses to keep them right.
“Safety is a massive thing because a lot of nurses are leaving and just doing bank work and a lot of nurses are off with stress and anxiety.” Susan has had to make formal reports when she felt there were not enough staff to run the ward safely.
She said: “My ward has 24 patients. We have three staff nurses, that’s eight patients each to be responsible for, but it goes down to two at night so you have 12 patients each.
“But even eight patients is too much for the nurse in charge with all her other duties. We have to rely so heavily on clinical support workers. They see the patients more than the nurses do. It is soul destroying.”
Staff shortages are so great that nurses are encouraged to do extra hours as bank nurses to make up the shortfall. Susan explained: “We can work 40 hours a week on the bank and 37.5 hours on the ward so we can work up to 77 hours a week.
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“We are not forced to do bank shifts but we are made to feel guilty if we don’t because you don’t want to let your colleagues down. You are shattered. But sometimes you have to take a step back and say, ‘I’m done’, you physically can’t do any more.”
She added: “Lots of nurses who qualified at the same time as me have already left or are planning to quit to go on bank. For me the pressure was so bad I had to quit for my own sanity.”
Theresa Fyffe, Royal College of Nursing Scotland director, said: “Sadly, this echoes what I hear from frontline nursing staff across Scotland.”
Labour’s health spokesman Anas Sarwar said: “We have a workforce crisis in our NHS. Unless we have adequate staffing more and more of our hard-working staff will walk away.”
Frances Dodd, NHS Lanarkshire acute divisional nurse director, insisted: “The safety of staff and patients is of paramount importance. We have mandatory training for appropriate staff to enable them to manage challenging situations.
“Staff who work extra shifts through the staff bank, do so on a voluntary basis.”
A Scottish Government spokesman said they recognised “pressures in our nursing workforce” and said while there has been an increase of almost six per cent in the number of qualified nurses, they were determined to “go further to ensure a sustainable nursing workforce long into the future”.
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