to think that my perfectly compos mentis, continent..

[seeker]

...90 year old mother should wet her bed because there are not enough staff on duty in the hospital to get bring her a bed pan in less than 30 minutes?

3 times this has happened in a week. I am furious, heartbroken and outraged.

Riven are you sure the staff wasn't in handover? Or getting a handover? IF that was the situation there should have been other staff on the ward to help with toileting.

When you have one or two nurses handing over all the information for 34 patients it takes a long time. They tend to do it at the nurse's station in case something happens on the ward (and because they took or staff room away).

It should take 40 minutes or so to hand over that many patients to the oncoming shift. BUt because of the constant interruptions in can take more like 3 hours. So not only is the off going nurse leaving 2 hours late unpaid but it is 2 hours into the shift before the oncoming nurse knows what the situation is with her patients. And interruptions lead to very important information getting missed from the handover.

IT sounds cruel but the safest things the Nurses can do is get through the handover asap and ignore any non emergency interruptions whilst it is ongoing. Sucks but it is safer than interrupting handover everytime one of those 34 patients needs the loo.

On my ward a lot of staff hang out at the nurses station chatting and they usually are not nurses. They tend to be clinical support, OT, Physios, equipment technicians etc. I know they are dressed very similiarly to Nurses but that doesn't mean that they are. IT is easy to see why people get confused.

The thing is pisces moon is that the public doesn't get it really. They often mistake busy nurses for mean nurses. The other day I had a patient crash and I fast paged the doctor. I was stood over the phone with baited breath praying that he would ring back quickly. The patient was obviously going to die if we didn't get the medical reg up there quickly.

If I had walked away from the phone and he had called back without getting an answer he would not have bothered to call back again. And we do not have a ward clerk so I really needed to answer that phone the second he called back. The first ring preferably. If someone would have come up to me and asked for a bedpan at that moment I would have had to say no way not now I am really sorry.

A visitor walked by while I was staring at the phone and says "Look at the nurse just standing around at the desk while patients suffer".

I was at the end of a 14 hour shift without a break as the only nurse for 19 patients. I was not happy. There should be a PALS for staff.

If nurses are choosing to ignore patients' very basic needs because they don't have enough staff to do a proper handover, then they need to shout very loudly at management. It is the nurses' professional responsibility to care for patients and to ensure any situations that leave patients at risk are referred up and addressed by senior management. Thrusting incontinence pads at a perfectly continent patient is not a solution. Ignoring patients who need help is not a solution.

Where are the HCAs, by the way? Presumably it is actual qualified nurses doing handover - so why aren't there any HCAs who can take patients to the loo?

Been shouting very loudly at management for years. My ward alone has put in over 116 short staffing incident forms in over the last year. We have been in contact with the RCN, Unison, and the NMC. Two of us went undercover with the media. A third did an interview with the Beeb in early 2008 I think it was. And there is this blog to try and alert people to what is happening: militantmedicalnurse.blogspot.com/
Been at it since 2008 putting professional license and job on the line to try and put a stop to intentional short staffing by those who hold the purse strings. And guess what? No one is listening and no one cares.

Yes Edam there will be one or two health care assistants on the 34 bed ward who are probably already engaged with other patients while the Nurse is giving handover. Do you realise how many patients on a ward that size need basic care all at the same time?

There are usually more requests for help simultaneously than there are NUrses. It is foolish to think that the poor bloke in the bed asking for the toilet is the only one needing it at that time.

Oh wrote the the MP as well. A few of them. They don't give a shit either.

You are right about the Nurses's professional registration being at stake. When something happens because managment shorts staffs the wards INTENTIONALLY the Nurse is the one who goes down. Despite all the bitching we do and the incident forms we fill in. The RCN has no power to demand that the hospitals invest in RN staffing.

The only solution for UK Nurses is to get the HELL out of the UK and move to a country with RN/patient ratio laws in effect. I recommend Victoria in Australia or California.

The public, the doctors, and the managers in the NHS get an absolute kick out of not investing in Nursing and Nurse staffing and then they love to slag the Nurses off as being uncaring when patients get neglected etc etc. It is funny to them.

Seriously, get out of the UK because it is going to get a whole lot worse. I realised that when I read the governments response to my latest petition regarding staffing. They just don't take Nurses seriously.

Complain but as others have said it might not do much good.

The staffing levels on adult general wards (medical / surgical/ care of the elderly) are crap.

I can be busy at work but am never as busy as those poor nurses.

My mother had nothing but admiration-she thought they had too much to do. One night they had an emergency and didn't get everyone settled for the night until almost midnight-it wasn't their fault-just not enough staff. A few of the patients were also quite difficult.

When I had pneumonia in February, I was in a ward filled with 5 other ladies who were all aged 70-90. The oldest of the ladies used to buzz for someone to help her eat her food, but by the time anyone came (if they did at all) it was so cold she couldn't eat it. It got to the point where it was upsetting me so much that I disconnected my own oxygen supply and went over to cut her food up for her and help her eat it. I then got told off by the nurse for disconnecting myself...But the poor woman had been in for 2 weeks, I was in for a week and lost half a stone, ths woman looked like a bag of bones in skin yet I was the only person available to help her, and I was seriously ill with pneumona myself!

I think that you have to be quite firm and willing to assert yourself-not something that all elderly are capable of doing. My mother's friend is in at the moment and can only eat soup. The nurse was treating her like a DC and wanting her to eat a sandwich, he friend was able to say that she could no more eat a sandwich than fly to the moon, she was a fully functioning adult with all her faculties and would like to be treated as such. She says the nurse was very apologetic and was being extra nice to her!

Sorry-my point was that if you are ill it is all a bit too much-they need someone to spend time with them, especially with food.

Loves - yes, entirely fair point that it is the nurse's registration that is on the line while the managers who employ too few nurses have nothing to lose. That is clearly wrong.

The College of Medicine is calling for trust boards to have one member who is responsible for safety and patient care - at the moment it is a generic board responsibility so no one person worries about losing their job. Going into the red keeps the chief exec awake at night, leaving elderly patients to soil themselves doesn't even register (with some chief execs, not all, of course).

Loves, have sent you a message via MN - feel free to ignore if it isn't helpful. Just an idea.

Sorry to hear this seeker

LovestheChaos are you Nurse Anne?

I've read militant nurse's blog for ages, and your writing style is very similar (although toned down on here!)

I agree with everything you have written and that is said in the blog. I wonder if the enquiry in Staffordshire will look into the role of the NMC. They seem very keen to penalise individual nurses, but not the trust managers that contribute to appalling staffing.

OP please complain about the staffing levels, managers do not listen to staff on the ground, but do have a duty to respond to complaints.

Getting out of nursing was the best thing I ever did. I loved the patient care but daily felt undervalued and overwhelmed in the profession due to ever increasing workload with inadequate staffing levels, unpaid overtime, often no meal breaks, disrespect for nursing in the UK generally and pretty crap pay. And I also blame the nursing unions - what the hell do they do for the money? RCN is useless and don't fight for their members. Have just read 'militant medical nurse' as recommended by poster and by gees it brought back memories. I felt stressed and overwhelmed just reading it. I take my hat off to all the nurses who are still slogging it out in the NHS, you are amazing.

Altaira I have written for Nurse Anne but I am not the main person who blogs there iyswim