Nurse: I was not trained to deal with mass death
1 September 2022, 20:56
Nurse: I was not trained to deal with mass death
A caller who has worked in the NHS for 14 years spoke to Ben Kentish about the struggles she has witnessed first hand in the health sector.
After Steve Barclay gave a speech today, in which he argued the NHS is trying to do too much, Ben Kentish asked listeners for insight from NHS workers.
Sarah, a nurse from Basildon, called in and shared her personal experience: “I worked for the NHS when it was under Labour and then when it moved under the Tory government, under ‘so called’ austerity, all preventative measures were stopped and that was because we had no money.”
She went on to explain the added pressure that was applied to her work during the pandemic.
“Then we went into covid and services were told: 'We’ve got no more money. But you deal with this as well, you go make sure people are safe at home when they are discharged from hospital. But we’re not going to give you any more money to do it. In fact what we’ve done is cut all the nursing ability to develop so extremely that you have to go into lots of debt to do it for not a lot of pay'.”
Ben asked: “Have you seen a demand for services increase? Has the workload for people like you got greater?”
Sarah replied: “Patients have gotten so more complex. They are trying to keep people out of hospitals. So community [workers] are dealing with the most complex patients who would have been dealt with in hospital a number of years ago.”
Ben inquired: “Is that because hospitals can’t cope?”
Sarah responded: “Yes and then the expectation is that you’re seeing a huge amount of patients a day in a small amount of time.”
She continued to say that on top of all this “you have staff that went through hellish covid… community [workers] saw horrendous things just like the hospitals did. People dying at home”.
Reflecting on her time working through Covid-19 she recalled a comment made to her.
“I remember someone saying: ‘Well that’s your job, get on with it'.
"Well I was not trained to deal with mass death,” the caller expressed.
“It’s got to the point now with staff where you try to boost morale… and they look at you as if to say ‘What on earth are you on about?’ There is nothing left to boost the tanks empty,” she told Ben.
“All we are doing is functioning the best we can and providing the best care we possibly can in the most rubbish circumstances.”
