A career in nursing: ‘I can’t give what I’d like to give to people’
Aisling Fahey, 25, chose a career in nursing because she loves helping people, but some days she heads home after her shift wondering if she helped anyone at all.
“I can’t give what I’d like to give to people and it’s very frustrating,” she says.
Aisling is one of 35,000 members of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) whose frustration is so great that they are today engaging in only the second national strike in the union’s 100-year history.
Further 24-hour strikes are inevitable in the absence of proposals to address the nurses’ pay demands — the INMO blames poor wages for the current crisis in recruitment and retention in Ireland.
Aisling’s frustration is fuelled by an inability to give patients the time and attention they deserve because of the pressure she’s constantly under.
She’s on the ward at the Mercy University Hospital in Cork, for 7.30am each morning and “rarely” leaves before 9.30pm, she says.
“It takes a lot out of you. When I first entered nursing, I had no idea what it was going to entail.”
Aisling, from Clonmel, Co Tipperary, is a clinical nurse manager and has had a full-time job for the past two years. The spectre of nmaking a mistake that could cost her her career looms large.
“When you’re constantly working in a high-pressure situation, when you are short staffed, working on busy wards, when you are tired, you are more inclined to make mistakes.
“The reality is, you are compromised. If you make a mistake, you don’t know the implications until it happens, and that is very frightening.
“I could end up before a fitness-to-practise hearing and lose my professional registration.” Aisling is on a general medical/surgical ward where the caseload is 31 patients.
She says hospital management “does its utmost” to maintain safe staffing levels, but is fighting the same fight as hospitals nationwide, trying to recruit and retain staff.Agency staff are drafted in and nurses are redeployed from less busy parts of the hospital to areas where demand isgreatest, she says.
Aisling completed four years’ training to become a nurse, and interned at the Mercy.
“I felt myself that a lot of the time, I was learning by trial and error, which can be dangerous.
“We all want to support each other, but staff nurses are under such pressure, they don’t always have the time.
It means learning from mistakes a lot of the time, and that’s dangerous for the trainee and for the patient.
Aisling would never advise anybody drawn to nursing not to consider it as a career but she would advise them about where to practise.
“Probably not in this country,” she says. “Maybe here is not the place to do nursing if you want to give quality care.”
On foot of today’s strike, beginning at 8am, more than 25,000 patients will have medical appointments disrupted.
In addition to 13,000 hospital outpatient appointments and 2,000 surgeries being cancelled, 10,400 appointments in community care services will be postponed.
