Register - WIN a $10,000 Safari | Login

'Run off their feet' and no end in sight

By Paul Heinrichs
May 9, 2004

"Run off their feet," observed Iris Kerr, a patient in Maryborough Hospital, as a nurse scurried in and out of her ward. "Off their feet!" she adds for emphasis.

Ms Kerr is 10 days into this stay, her third with a foot complaint, and she is satisfied with care at the hospital, 200 kilometres north-west of Melbourne.

As for the nurses, who work mostly without complaint on a morning ratio of one-to-six patients, as opposed to city nurses' one-to-four, she's more than sympathetic. It ought to be evened up, she thinks.

In the next bed, Valerie Pitt, recovering from surgery, said: "Everything's explained - it's more personalised. They popped in heaps of times last night."

The Maryborough nurses received the pay rise negotiated by the ANF after industrial action, but their ratios, set in the previous enterprise agreement, did not change. The afternoon shift ratio is one-to-seven, compared to the city's one-to-four, and the night shift one-to-10 compared to the city's one-to-eight.

Advertisement Advertisement

Nursing is a tough job in any hospital - in Maryborough, where nurses have to do tasks their city counterparts do not because of the lack of ancillary or specialised staff, there is almost no let-up. Friday was a quiet day by the hospital's standards. There was no operating theatre, no births (the hospital records about 130 a year) and only two admissions, although there were 10 patients discharged, one of the most time-consuming activities.

Yet it was still busy, as The Sunday Age saw while spending a shift with nurses in the Amherst wing, the acute medical, surgical and birthing ward, where Bettina Gordon is nurse unit manager. There were 32 patients out of a maximum of 35, and six nurses available. The day was unexceptional, but in another way, Friday was hugely important for the hospital, which will be 150 years old in October.

The newspaper carried the news that the hospital's $17.5 million two-stage redevelopment would be fully funded - it includes a new nursing home and major improvements for the main hospital buildings.

Premier Steve Bracks and Health Minister Bronwyn Pike arrived for a one-hour tour and media event.