NSW nurses set to strike after three waves of Covid bring them to breaking point
Thousands of nurses and midwives from more than 150 public hospitals are set to strike across the state for better nurse to patient ratios and more pay after enduring three Covid strains.
NSW
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They have been the quiet backbone of NSW Health’s response to Covid and the ongoing Omicron outbreak, but now the state’s nurses have had enough.
On Tuesday, thousands of nurses and midwives from more than 150 public hospitals will strike across the state for better nurse to patient ratios and more pay.
“It has been incredibly hard,” NSW Nurses and Midwives Association member and Westmead Hospital Intensive Care Unit nurse Julie Butterworth said. “We are just broken.
“We have had to sacrifice a lot of our home lives and our safety to care for our patients through three waves of Covid.
“When we asked for our patients to get more nurses we did not get any.
“We were told ‘thank you for your sacrifice’, but we did not get the pay rise we were promised even before Covid began. I know so many nurses who want to quit right now because we are so short-staffed and overworked.”
Nurses have voted to go on strike for the first time in almost a decade in a bid to get more staff for their patients and a pay rise over 2.5 per cent to compensate for the pay freeze imposed when the pandemic began.
NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association general secretary Brett Holmes said: “We’ve been asking to meet with the Premier for weeks and talk through our members’ concerns.
“The staffing crisis in health won’t simply go away as Covid-19 case numbers reduce. What we’re asking for is not unreasonable. There’s evidence nurse-to-patient ratios do save lives and result in better patient outcomes.
“Legislated ratios have saved governments in other jurisdictions millions of dollars and their public health systems are better off.
“We’re behind in NSW and nurses are walking away because of what they’ve had to put up with.”
Registered nurse and union delegate Cassandra Barford said nurses were overworked. “We often miss meals to make sure patients get the care they need and spend the breaks we do have lamenting that we could not do more for patients.”
However, a NSW Health spokeswoman said the number of nurses had increased by almost 25 per cent to almost 52,000, with another 5000 on the way, and was at the highest level in history.
The current patient-ratio system “considers the numbers of patients, their complexity, acuity and care needs – while also allowing for the professional judgment of nurses, nurse managers and workforce directors to adjust staffing levels to reflect the changing care needs of patients”, the spokeswoman said.
It is understood the government is also looking at the possibility of a pay rise for nurses.
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