Nurses fear night duty

Press, 9 July 1983, Page 3

Nurses fear night duty

Nurses at Queen Mary Hospital at Hanmer Springs feared for their lives at the hands of some patients, said a union representative, Mr J. M. McKenzie, last evening. They have given the North Canterbury Hospital Board 14 days notice that they will no longer work alone on night duty in the hospital’s two villas.

“The nurses are not going to strike,” said Mr McKenzie, the secretary of the Combined State Union regional committee. However, they could not be expected to cope with the sole charge of up to 55 patients in each villa, including drug addicts. Nurses had been threatened and he believed in one case, assaulted by patients. “They have patients that have either come from or are going to the major

security hospital in New Zealand, Lake Alice,” Mr McKenzie said.

Yet Queen Mary was not a security hospital and up to 80 per cent of hospital staff had neither the psychiatric or comprehensive nursing training to deal with attacks.

Union representatives had accepted that it might take the Hospital Board years to increase the number of qualified staff to the level required by law. “But we are not going to have young, unqualified nurses working in those villas on their own,” Mr McKenzie said.

He accused the hospital’s administration of not doing enough to ensure that there are warning bells installed in the villas and to provide other safety provisions, including properly trained staff.

The hospital superintend-

ent, Dr R. J. M. Crawford, said yesterday that there had been no incidents other than those in the normal course of nursing duties. He had been asked to prepare a report for the board within 14 days, on the matters raise by the union. The board’s chief executive officer, Mr R. I. Parker, said it had agreed recently to start a new advertising campaign aimed at attracting more registered psychiatric nurses to Queen Mary Hospital. “I think the publicity is unfortunate in that I understand there have been no assaults on nurses at the hospital,” he said. “That does not mean there is not the possibility of an assault occurring in any of our hospitals.” Queen Mary Hospital was not a psychiatric hospital, and it was in an isolated area. There had been a

national shortage of registered psychiatric nurses and psychiatric hospitals themselves had trouble attracting staff, he said. The local hospital representative of the Public Service Association, Mr T. A. Warr, said problems faced by nurses working alone at night had brought matters to a head, but more staff were also needed on other shifts. The P.S.A. wanted a joint working party set up to come to a firm agreement about the hospital staffing levels. The staff shortage also posed other problems. One example was a nurse alone on night duty recently had to ignore two disturbances among psychiatrically disturbed patients on her ward to attend to a dying patient. Mr Warr said the nurse should not have had to make that choice.