Beyond breaking point: ICU nurses in crisis

Nurses have reached a point beyond burnout as the strain on intensive care wards grow amid the dramatic rise in Omicron cases.

Intensive care unit nurses get their message across outside Westmead Hospital in Sydney on Wednesday. Picture: John Feder

Intensive care nurse David Russell has just reached a point ­beyond burnout.

His personal breaking point arrived when a young anti-vaxxer died under his care, while their family yelled abuse from outside that Covid-19 “wasn’t real”.

“The whole family was abusing us and telling us to stop what we were doing and we were trying to save the young person’s life; the person died and the family hated us,” he said.

“The emotional aspect of us being under resources and understaffed and trying to help a person, and a family who is outside telling us it’s not real – that is the time I got super emotional.”

Mr Russell is one of dozens of nurses who protested outside Westmead Hospital in Sydney on Wednesday, calling on the Perrottet government to address critical staffing shortfalls as ICUs across NSW fill up with Covid-19 patients – with admissions jumping from 203 to 217 on Wednesday.

Mr Russell, who works at Westmead’s ICU ward and has 11 years experience in the speciality, said he and his team were so exhausted from months of caring for critically ill Covid patients – which “flooded” hospitals after the NSW government removed mask mandates late last year – that it had reached crisis point.

“The problem is the volume of work and the minimum amount of time and staff to do our work; that is where the stress is,” he said.

“People are pretty much crying everyday. I have an office in the ICU and pretty much every day a nurse is sitting there and crying because they don’t know what to do, they want to keep their job, they want to care for their patients, but because you’re so exhausted and you have no one to help you, you emotionally breakdown.

“We have heaps of people ­trying to get out of the profession, we have new people coming in to fill their spots but they’re not fully trained.”

Nurse David Russell outside Westmead Hospital. John Feder

Premier Dominic Perrottet has repeatedly insisted that while the state’s hospitals were under strain, they were “coping”, with the government releasing modelling that showed ICU capacity could go up to 600 beds.

ICU nurse Wing Besilos said that it was now regular practice for patients who required one-on-one care to have to share one nurse. Clinical nurse educators, who normally don’t have direct responsibility for a patient, have been roped in to help by monitoring the emergency pager.

The 46-bed ICU ward, which is filled with people who are “as sick as sick gets” and requires about 38 nurses to staff optimally, was often running between 10 to 19 nurses short, due to staff contracting Covid-19 or calling in sick from exhaustion.

“I want to tell the Premier the hospital system is not strong, it’s crumbling down,” Ms Besilos said.

“They just don’t have the courage to call a code brown like Victoria has, because we are so short staffed. At one point ICU was 19 nurses short on one shift, they were able to get overtime and some agency casual but at the end of the day we were still 11 short.”

Wing Besilos at the ICU nurse protest at Westmead Hospital. Picture: John Feder

Nurse Amy Halvorsen worked in the neurosurgical high dependency ward at Westmead, until she resigned over a week ago when the stress of the chronic understaffing and conditions took too much of a toll to continue. “How are we meant to stay here and fight it out when we still have patients intubated from the Delta wave,” she said.