Kate Goodman is running on empty.
Key points:
- A new report reveals 60 per cent of frontline workers are planning to leave their roles in the next five years
- Nurses and midwives in NSW are experiencing such high levels of stress and burnout that 15 per cent are reporting symptoms of PTSD
- Experts are calling for better pay and mandated staff-patient ratios
Since the peak of the COVID pandemic, the 27-year-old registered emergency nurse has been overworked and stressed.
Some patients are aggressive. The hospital she works at is short-staffed. Among the nurses, anxiety, depression, and insomnia are rife.
“We don’t have enough people on the rosters to cover vacancies,” Ms Goodman said.
“We don’t have enough senior experience to mentor junior staff.”
She said she had some symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
“I’ve found it actually quite difficult to step towards certain situations at work because once they started to feel like experiences I’d had that caused me to feel distress, I didn’t want to re-approach that in case it happened again,” she said.
She is not the only one. A new report commissioned by the NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association found 15 per cent of nurses and midwives in New South Wales had reported symptoms of PTSD.
Almost 60 per cent of nurses and midwives surveyed plan to leave their job in the next five years, which will further contribute to the staffing issues in the sector.
“It probably wasn’t the best time to start a career in nursing but I didn’t know … four years ago that the world would have a pandemic,” Ms Goodman said.
Experts call for solutions
The report, conducted by the Rosemary Bryant AO Research Centre, surveyed more than 2,300 workers.
According to the secretary of the NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association, Shaye Candish, work overload was one of the significant factors.
“They’re constantly being asked to do more than they’re capable of doing, which leads to significant guilt that then creates this sort of cycle of trauma.”
The survey identified early-career nurses and midwives such as Ms Goodman were the most vulnerable because they were expected to work extra hours and outside their area of expertise — an issue almost half of all of those surveyed reported.
“We need to have nurses and midwives sufficiently compensated with a pay rise that reflects the work that they do,” Ms Cavendish said.
“And we also need really solutions-focused approaches to this type of evidence that demonstrates there is trauma being experienced by these workforces.”
The association has long been calling for a cap on the state’s public-sector wages to be removed so workers can get a boost in pay.
It also wants staff-patient ratios to be mandated, as they are in most other jurisdictions in the country.
Terry Slevin, the CEO of the Public Health Association of Australia, said health care across the country was under strain.
“When it comes to New South Wales, clearly the pressure point is right now, and that is the lead into an election in late March,” he said.
“And so I’m sure both sides of politics are looking at ways in which they can offer packages that give people confidence that they’re the right people to govern New South Wales for the next four years.
“[They’re] making sure there’s a strong commitment to health, both in terms of the acute healthcare sector and in terms of broader public health investment.”
In a statement, a New South Wales Health spokesperson said the government was improving mental health support in hospitals, and it had announced the largest healthcare workforce boost in the state’s history, including an 18 per cent increase in the intake of graduate nurses and midwives this year.