Strike No. 3:

Western Sydney Local Pickett Line at Westmead Hospital - 1st September 2022.

For the third time this year, the NSW Nurses and Midwifery Union took further industrial action to push necessary Ratios. Sydney nurses help local pickets for the first time in the city for 24hours.

We ask our patients to trust us when they're vulnerable, and right now I don't feel deserving of that trust.

We are tired, we are chronically understaffed, taken advantage of, lied to, and been told to put up with and normalise unsafe workloads. In ICU, we are asked to team nurse patients that should be 1:1. Patients who are intubated and ventilated, on multiple complex infusions, on dialysis - are grouped with other patients and 'team nursed'. As a result we've had more and more assist calls, self-extubations and line removals including the loss of a dialysis catheter while dialysis was running... its not good enough.

Not until we can get nurse to patient ratios. There’s no other choice. Ratios are a matter of life or death! We need:

1:1 in ICU

1:2 in HDU

1:3 in ED

1:4 in the wards