Speaking as a nurse.... so demoralised and fed up.
Just got off a night shift, one nurse and two healthcare assistants for two wards of 12 patients. 24 in total. All elderly and with a high level of needs. 22 of them incontinent, 10 of them with dementia.
No laundry had been delivered that day, as we had exceeded our budget for laundry and nobody had authorised another delivery, eventually we had to beg laundry to be taxied over from a nearby trust. There were only 30 incontinence pads in the stock room.
In between attending to patients, there was paperwork cleaning, a stock check, and the constant bed changes due to wetness. Our trust is one who has joined a pay cartel, and is trying to take away the enhancements for night working (currently you get paid your hourly rate plus one third).
Also have realised that due to the European working hours not allowing us to do long days anymore, I have been put on ten back to back earlies (7am-2.30pm) from my next shift which starts on Friday.
The breaking down of Primary Care Trusts means that I now work for a social enteriprise, and have not had dementia training, despite having to nurse people with dementia - the training is provided by the acute Trust, and the social enterprise would be charged for this, so we have been told we can't go.
Everytime you want to order something you have to go through management as you are not sure if your Trust provides it or not, so much time and effort is spent doing administration taks and chasing people instead of nursing. A health visitor had a go at me on the phone this morning, as they are being charged £70 an hour to use the clinic room in our hospital, as they now work for another Trust, and have been told they can't do this and have to "find" a room in one of their Trust's building.
At 6am this morning one of the nurses phoned in sick. We have been told that we have to exhaust every avenue before we get agency staff, this involved me going through the list of registered staff and systematically phoning them at 7am to ask them if they wanted to come into work at 7.30am (obviously they were all delighted at this) and due to the low staff morale and understaffing none of them want to work on their days off. This resulted in telephoning the bank, who did not have any staff who wanted to work so ended up gong to agency anyway which necessitated a visit to the managers office and getting treated like shit as if it was my fault nobody wanted to work.
On top of that you get the constant media slatings, I love nursing and look after my patients to the best possible standard I can manage (I would like to say the highest, but circumstances can prevent us providing the highest possible care, despite the fact we would like to), but you don't see any of those stories in the paper!
Just wanted to rant, as so wound up after my night shift I cannot sleep. At this moment in time if someone said do you want to stop nursing, i would probably say YES!