A Canberra Hospital nurse has blown the whistle on continuing falling patient care standards at the ACT's largest hospital.
The experienced nurse was critical of a suite of measures announced by health minister Katy Gallagher to improve patient care, saying it didn't tackle the important question of nurse to patient ratios.
It came one week after the Sunday Canberra Times published the story of a woman whose father received poor care at the Canberra Hospital in the last week of his life.
"Staffing is a huge issue. You just have to walk into the Canberra Hospital sometimes and all the patients are backlogged in the Emergency Department. They say there's no problem but yes there is," the nurse said.
"They're [Nurses] not getting the basic training and I think we're just attracting a different breed. A lot of the younger nurses just don't care.
"I've seen mouths that haven't been cleaned for days, personal hygiene that patients can't do themselves not attended to for days, food containers left without the lids taken off and other things that are too bad to name."
The whistleblower said nurses had brought problems to their superiors a number of times but no one was interested in finding a solution.
"I've gone to them, unfortunately it just comes down to the dollar. You might say, 'I don't think this nurse is quite ready to look after these patients' and [they say] 'Oh this is good experience for them'. So there's no support for nurses either," they said.
Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation ACT secretary Jenny Miragaya said members often reported too great a workload for the number of staff or the skill mix available.
She said there were reports of clinical development nurses no longer being rostered on during weekends, removing the opportunity for new or inexperienced nurses to receive monitoring and support.
"I think the nursing and midwifery staff working the Canberra Hospital are very dedicated, highly trained experts in delivering care [but] they are working within a system that is quite stretched at times," Ms Miragaya said.
Healthcare Consumers Association of the ACT executive director Darlene Cox said the quality of patient care needed to improve.
"They are working on this and I've got confidence that they're aware of it. It's just that sometimes the rate of changes can be slow which from a system perspective we can accept but when it's your relative in that bed you absolutely want the best care right now," she said.
"The variation in care is not acceptable. We want people to receive safe, high quality care, every time they go into the hospital."
