NSW Health minister Jillian Skinner has been forced to respond to claims poor planning is behind nurse shortages at Wagga hospital.
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It comes as beleaguered nurses at the hospital continue to work 700 hours of overtime per week to cover shifts.
On Thursday, Wagga hospital branch president Natalie Ellis asked Ms Skinner whether the government had considered greater staffing needs when building the new hospital.
The minister for health was answering questions at the NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association annual conference in Sydney.
Wagga hospital’s staffing problems should serve as a warning for future builds, Ms Ellis said.
“There’s been several new beautiful hospitals built,” Ms Ellis told The Daily Advertiser.
“We’ve heard stories similar to Wagga, where the footprint is double the size, but while they funded the building of the hospital facility, there is certainly not funding for the increase in staff that’s required to safely run the wards.”
New hospitals will usually result in more presentations. From January to March this year, Wagga’s emergency department experienced a spike of 1000 more presentations compared to the same period in 2015.
Regional facilities such as Wagga hospital can struggle to meet this new demand, as they do not have mandated patient to nurse ratios that exist in city hospitals, Ms Ellis said. In metropolitan hospitals a general ward must have a nurse-patient ratio of one to four.
But at Wagga hospital that ratio was often one to five during the day, and as high as one nurse to 10 sick patients at night, Ms Ellis said.
“For a nurse to be able to give the care they want to give, it is very challenging if you have that amount of patients,” Ms Ellis said. “Why are the people in our rural communities supposedly not as important sick as the people in cities?”
In response to Ms Ellis’ question, Ms Skinner told the conference staffing levels and new developments “take time to work their way through”.
"There are trade offs,” she said. “I acknowledge the importance of making sure we have the right number of nurses.
“I give you my commitment that I will continue to raise this with the ministry through to the districts".
