Healthcare students on the brink: how does an NHS in crisis IMPACT them?
By Claire Dickson
In May of this year a Westminster committee heard that Northern Ireland’s health service was ‘beyond crisis’ with a spokesperson from the Royal College of Nursing commenting that the health service had ‘fallen off a cliff edge.’ With a series of strikes this year taking place across the sector, I spoke with three nursing students and a midwifery student from Queen’s University Belfast who have been on placement throughout this turbulent year.
‘That situation could have been drastically improved for both myself and the patient if there had been more staff there. After that day I just went home and cried and the nurse with me told me the next day that she had too.’
One of the students commented that ‘When you first go into placement, no one knows who you are, so you awkwardly stand there looking round for someone to introduce yourself too – I think they’re just too busy and pushed to notice you. You really have to do your own thing because most of the qualified healthcare staff are too busy completing their own tasks to be able to show you how to complete yours. We were short staffed one day and the nurse forgot to give someone their insulin which resulted in the nurse being told off by the Sister. Really she had managed to sort everyone else out and keep everyone else alive but missed one person. But the buck stops with the nurse when really understaffing is not their fault. It’s just so unfair.’
Anotherstudent spoke of a harrowing experience she had on placement recently which highlighted starkly for her the pressures the health service is currently facing. ‘I was working with a nurse and we had two bays of patients to look after. Usually, one nurse has a bay of between six and eight patients but that day we had two bays so really there was one nurse tending to ten patients. After 1pm we had no healthcare assistant due to understaffing and this was a trauma ward which is always very heavy. Whilst the nurse was on a break, I was the only person looking after that significant number of patients. A patient was receiving a blood transfusion and because he took unwell during it, I thought he was going to die – he didn’t in the end but I couldn’t have known that as I’m not fully qualified. I was extremely stressed and had to run and get the Sister in a total panic. That situation could have been drastically improved for both myself and the patient if there had been more staff there. After that day I just went home and cried and the nurse with me told me the next day that she had too.’
The third student told me that ‘I was on placement with a nurse who taken a stroke at 40 years of age due to stress levels and pressure on the health service. It would put you off wanting to work in the industry. There are people on placement who are constantly having to ring in sick because of stress which ended up putting even more pressure on students that were in. Dressings that are supposed to take up to an hour long are shoved into the space of ten minutes.’
When I asked the students about their views on how much nurses get paid, one stated that ‘I was shocked to find out that most nurses work over 37 and a half hours because they actually maybe want to go on holiday or they don’t want to simply survive. Quite a lot of nurses I know don’t take a job with the NHS so that they can do agency (private) work for a bit of extra money. Or they can reduce their hours with the NHS and use those hours to do agency work so they get a decent amount of pay. But when it comes to striking, some nurses feel a lot of apathy because we don’t have as government and they don’t feel anything is going to be done about the situation anyway.’
In the view of all three nursing students, QUB could do more to prepare nursing students for the realities of the day-today job. ‘Yes they tell you, here are the skills you need to practice but that doesn’t take reality into account. You need to know that you’re not going to be able to do everything to the highest standard, like the way they teach you to do it. I was told by a teacher at Queen’s that there is plenty of time to get everything done, I just needed to prioritise better. But that isn’t reality.’
These three students always wanted to be nurses but all of them used the word ‘naïve’ to describe how ill-prepared they were for what the job under the current pressures entails.
The midwifery student I spoke to gave a similar overview of life on placement. ‘Burnout is a common trend within midwifery. Understaffing is a regular occurrence and the pay isn’t close to matching the effort put in every day. Most midwives end up leaving the profession or don’t even start at all once they qualify. We stay more than 13 hours most days and then go home to do assignments set by the university and most of us have to do a part time job on top of this. The NHS are crying out for midwives, but the students are treated like this?’
The lived experiences of these students on placement have forced them to consider the knock-on impact of understaffing and pressures on the NHS. But without an Executive at Stormont, decisions regarding the state of the vital service don’t look to be happening anytime soon.
Edited by David Williamson
Claire Dickson is Head of the Scoop and a 3rd year politics student at QUB.