Read a selection of quotes from the some of the nurses and midwives that feature in Dispatches: Confessions of a Nurse.
"You might just have two midwives for 30 women on the post-natal ward. Six of them might have caesarean sections. They don't get their pads changed. They might sit in the bed bleeding. They rest of them are likely to be breast feeding, and lots of women want help with breast feeding and they don't get it."
"The monitors are left on, but there's no one to actually physically look at the babies' heart rate tracing, so you could miss foetal distress or any other problem with the mum as well."
"Some days you'll be able to give a really good quality care, other days if you're pushed they will get the bare minimum."
"Sometime we are forced to cut corners. A patient will be sitting in one of the rooms, blood not being taken, or not given analgesia as well. We know the situation, that patients are waiting; treatment is being delayed. We don't have enough staff, doctor-wise or nurse-wise, and we know as staff that somehow something might happen which we would not be able to catch on time."
"The most worrying thing for me is to find a patient dead behind a closed curtain, and this has actually happened in our department. The patient was brought in by ambulance and was not looked at or not even checked by staff members, only to find that half an hour later the patient has passed away."
"If patients feel frustrated and stressed and not happy with the service, it is not only them, We nurses on the other side of the fence also feel the same. Much as we want to give them more we are not able to give them what we want to."
"There are a lot of scenarios in daily nursing - blood products being one, cutting corners, not checking things as they should. Other examples are obviously cleaning of areas for infection. I see regularly nurses walking out of cubicles with gloves still on, they've forgotten to take them off and it's because they're rushed, so therefore they haven't decontaminated before they come out of a room. Lots of (the) things we do because we're rushed and pressured do put us at risk of discipline. If you admit to doing something because you are tired or forget, you are also a risk of being disciplined."
"I come home after a day shift or a night shift and the thought of doing anything extra is just away from my mind. You know, I'm so tired. My feet hurt. I haven't had a meal break sometimes. I haven't had a wee, because I haven't had a drink for 12 hours."
"I still try and approach each shift thinking that it's going to be a busy day and I'm not going to get a break and I'm going to be 13 hours on my feet, and then if it's not like that come the end of the shift, then that's great."
"I've seen a drink put on the table out of the reach of a patient who cannot now take a drink themselves. I've seen patients who were not getting enough fluids in the day. But on a busy ward, there are bound to be omissions, aren't there?"
"The staffing levels and the workload mean that wherever I am I feel I should be somewhere else, and whatever I'm doing I feel I ought to have done earlier."
