Nurses working in intensive care and emergency departments throughout Melbourne say it is frustrating to hear the public complain about wearing light masks for brief periods, when they are forced to wear painful, heavy-duty personal protection equipment (PPE) for hours a day.
Key points:
- Hospital staff say it is disheartening and annoying to hear members of the public complain about having to wear masks
- Nurses say they are left with pressure injuries and soreness after wearing PPE all day
- Intensive care nurse Sam Bates asks members of the public to wear masks even if they find them uncomfortable or think they are part of a conspiracy
The nurses, many of whom have been working overtime as the number of hospital admissions has risen in Victoria, told 7.30 they experienced pressure injuries and bruising from wearing N95 masks and face shields, and were sore for days after their shifts.
They cannot take the masks and other PPE off while on shift, even to drink water.
"We're dehydrated because we can't drink all the time," Royal Melbourne emergency department nurse Mel Pearson said.
"It's a lot harder to just go pee if we want to.
"We have pressure injuries on our forehead and bruising on our chins and our noses.
"Seeing people in the community complain about their masks that they have to wear for half an hour to go to the shops is a little bit disheartening when our masks actually cause us physical injuries, just to keep us and our patients safe."
Residents in Victoria are required to wear a face covering — typically a cloth mask, surgical mask or scarf — when leaving home.
Ms Pearson's colleague Jack Baum said seeing complaints about wearing masks in the community had been one of the most frustrating parts of the pandemic.
"For our whole shift at work we put on all this [PPE] to keep everyone safe when we're treating them, and the public are just asked to chuck on a mask when they go to the supermarket for 20 minutes," he said.
"That's a bit annoying when you see people complaining about that."
Intensive care unit (ICU) nurse unit manager Sam Bates, who works across Western Health's Footscray and Sunshine Hospitals, described the past few weeks in the ICU as the busiest she had seen and pleaded with the community to wear masks to slow the transmission of COVID-19.
"I'm wearing one all day. I don't want to wear one all day. So please, if you have to wear one when you go out in public, just for half an hour or an hour, please do so. Every little bit helps."
'When is this ever going to end?'
Royal Melbourne senior clinical nurse specialist Chantel Edwards said the team was really feeling the effects of the increase in numbers of coronavirus patients in the past weeks and was doing its best to maintain high morale.
"But it's very challenging and frustrating when you're going to the supermarket and you're seeing people not abiding by the rules or think that the rules don't apply to them," she said.
Royal Melbourne emergency nurse Abbey Fistrovic, who worked six days last week with extra overtime, said watching the numbers rise each day had been incredibly difficult.
"I just saw our numbers which are up again and it's disheartening because I have the mask pushing all over my face and just being highly uncomfortable and [I'm] just thinking, when is this ever going to end?
"We're doing so much to keep you safe and hopefully you wonderful people keep us safe because now you're on the front line with us."
People 'afraid' to go to hospital, presenting too late
Royal Melbourne emergency department staff said one of the issues increasing their workload was people were presenting much later than usual with non-coronavirus related symptoms because they were scared to seek help.
"People are really afraid to come to hospital," Mel Pearson said.
"So we're seeing people much later in their presentation than we used to see people.
"We're seeing people with sepsis much later in their presentation, which makes it incredibly hard to treat those people because they're way sicker than we'd normally see them."
She said it was particularly difficult with stroke patients, who were experiencing much worse outcomes because they were delaying coming to hospital.
Nurse Alex Carroll said another major issue the emergency department was dealing with was an influx of mental health presentations.
"We're in a mental health crisis, but we're dressed in this [PPE] for the COVID patients, however we're still having to care for the mental health patients and a lot of the time, they're actually scared of us," she said.
"It's making their stay in hospital a lot worse, because they're not wanting to interact when we're looking this way.
"There's a lot more presentations because of the current climate and we're scaring them all the time in this PPE."
"They're very vulnerable," added Ms Fistrovic. "And they're not really understanding sometimes why you look the way you do."
Watch this story tonight on 7.30.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMibWh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIwLTA4LTAzL251cnNlcy1kby1ub3Qtd2FudC1wdWJsaWMtdG8tY29tcGxhaW4tYWJvdXQtY29yb25hdmlydXMtbWFza3MvMTI1MTI0MzbSASdodHRwczovL2FtcC5hYmMubmV0LmF1L2FydGljbGUvMTI1MTI0MzY?oc=5
2020-08-02 20:03:00Z
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