“At the moment I’ve got six trained staff leaving the unit, so that’s six trained nurses leaving at once. We don’t have anybody to replace them. So what we do is struggle on.”
“What we need is adequate staffing. We don’t have adequate staffing. We have [a ratio] of 1:10 patients quite normally in a day. But because we are an acute area, we can have unstable patients, we have patients on non-invasive life support, or patients can be on ventilation. I might have someone with dementia, who is wandering and confused, someone may have mental health problems and at risk of suicide or self-harm. I have, on the very rare occasion, had all [those types of patients] on the one shift and I am on my own with one HCA. So I’m expected to answer the buzzer and do the 11 pages plus of paperwork [needed for each patient]. Which is quite impossible.”