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It was close to 10.30am on Thursday when, with one arm gripping a physiotherapist who was helping me walk, I nearly stepped in faeces and urine in the corridor of one of Victoria’s leading COVID-19 wards.
Elena* in the hospital room next to me had told nursing staff she wasn’t ready to come off the toilet but, elderly and disordered, she was walked back to her room anyway by a nurse, leaving a trail of excrement behind her.
Age journalist Erin Pearson had a nightmarish stay in a COVID ward this month.Credit:Erin Pearson
In the previous few days I’d heard Elena, a challenging patient, cry and beg for someone to help her to the toilet, which was metres from her bed.
“Hello, hello. Help *cough* help, help. I need to go to the toilet. Help me,” she screamed.
As the Omicron surge continues across the country, inside this hospital, a stretched and junior workforce is struggling amid chronic staff shortages to keep their heads above water in unbearable working conditions. Up to 7000 staff are missing every day due to furloughing, and it shows.
I’m a seasoned patient. An asthma sufferer, I’ve spent significant periods in hospitals at some of the busiest times including New Year’s Eve and weekends. But my week in hospital with COVID this month was like nothing I’d ever seen.
An uncleaned toilet in a Victorian COVID ward.Credit:Erin Pearson
COVID-positive patients were experiencing hours-long delays in receiving time-sensitive medications; the elderly were left cold and hungry, patients unshowered, rooms in filthy conditions. Medication was lost, corners cut and dressings unchanged.
I watched as a rushed, nervous young nurse dropped pills on the floor, before picking them up and giving them to me.
“It’s my first day on the ward,” one young nurse told me, as she appeared to hold back tears.
Junior nurses say they are being left in charge of the poorly staffed infectious ward because senior staff are all being sent to the ICU on different floors. Graduate and trainee nurses are being put in difficult positions and are taking on tasks typically done by senior nurses, as they grapple with meeting patient care and going by the book.
“It’s a complete and utter bloody shambles,” the war veteran told me.
As problems arose, we’d try to find humour in them.
For days there were no drinking cups, because they ran out, and nurses were dissolving medication in the tiny plastic medicine cups, which we kept using for days. “Must be budget cuts,” we joked. No toilet paper for a day? We used paper hand towels instead. Even the microwave was removed from the ward due to COVID, we just sympathetically shrugged.
No one expects the public health system to operate like a hotel. You’re there to get better, not to have a good time. But when a doctor admitted that a junior staff member had needlessly attempted to draw blood from me, I started to feel unsafe.
We ran out of drinking cups, so our medication was put in tiny cups.Credit:Erin Pearson
And the cracks in a struggling system only became increasingly clear.
I was refused an MRI scan, ordered by a doctor, because staff said I was a COVID patient and they did not want me in the machine because they’d need to clean it afterwards. Ten days later the crippling pain in my back remains undiagnosed.
The state has had almost two years to get it right. But still the conditions on the ward were not fit for some of the state’s most unwell patients. When the ward ran out of blankets, one young nurse tried to use extra top sheets to keep a patient in his 90s warm.
“It’s a complete and utter bloody shambles,” the war veteran told me.
Camaraderie appeared strong, with junior nurses trying to support exhausted and overworked trainees. But the mood in the hallways outside the room was of stress, and had an air of chaos about it.
The nurses who are brave enough to don PPE and work in the COVID wards deserve to be adequately resourced and supported. Thank God for them. But who is looking out for them?
When you’re sick you want to feel safe. I discharged myself days earlier than I should have just to escape.
The Age contacted the hospital involved in this article.
*Elena is not her real name.
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