Patient safety routinely compromised in healthcare settings, INMO survey suggests

Almost two thirds of nurses believe that patient safety is being routinely compromised due to staffing levels in healthcare environments, a survey of more than 2,000 Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation members has found.

Just short of 66 per cent said patients are being put at risk “very often or always” with 85 per cent saying that the number of staff and mix of skills available where they worked did not adequately meet patient needs.

A similar number said they had raised their concerns over safety with a manager or organisation.

The Nursing and Midwifery Work and Wellbeing Survey highlights the effect workplace stress is having on frontline health service staff with almost a third, 30 per cent, saying it had prompted them to consider leaving their jobs in the past month while 24 per cent they had considered their current job due to feeling exhausted by their workloads. In all, 73 per cent of those surveyed said they had recently considered quitting.

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More than two thirds, 67 per cent, said “they always or very often feel physically exhausted” while 94 per cent the work was impacting on the psychological well-being and just over half, 53 per cent, said their physical health was being affected.

Pressure to work addition shifts may have contributed to some of those issues with 65 per cent of respondents saying they had experienced it and 64 per cent said they had first-hand experience of aggression in their workplace.

Describing the findings of as “stark” the union’s President, Karen McGowan, said conditions in the healthcare sector were not improving with management and staff having to cope with “crisis after crisis,” since the start of the pandemic.

[ More action needed to ensure healthcare workers are better protected, INMO president says ]

“As a society we’ve become more aware of the importance of protecting people’s mental health at work, except it seems when it comes to people who work in healthcare,” she said.

“This type of sustained stress over years and years has an absolutely crushing and traumatic effect on people, and these are the same people who are being asked to step up again and again to fill in the gaps. It’s just not sustainable.”

INMO General Secretary Phil Ní Sheaghdha said the stress and associated burnout being experienced by nurses in their workplaces “is devastating for individuals, but it also has a knock-on effect for the whole health service”.

The survey found almost three quarters of nurses and midwives and considered leaving their roles and “the fate of the entire health service is dependent on those people deciding to stick it out for another month or another year, whatever they feel they can do. In the meantime, the staffing shortages are having a direct impact on patients.

“You have to consider that unsafe staffing has become the norm and that hospitals are not safe for patients on any day of the year,” she said.