You can tell them by the dark blue scrubs they wear with cross trainers, the weariness around their eyes from too many late night shifts, and the small Waratah symbol on their left breast pocket, which identifies them as a nurse, or midwife in the NSW public hospital system. They are so familiar to us that we hardly notice them.
You see them in the supermarket buying food for the shift ahead, or on the bus, sleepily listening to music on the way home from a long night’s work or with a brood of children on a school run before the morning shift starts or sometimes in the pub laughing with colleagues, letting off steam after a particularly difficult afternoon on the wards.
Seemingly so every day in their manner, language and dress, our nurses are the practitioners that make NSW hospitals amongst the best in the world.
This year has been designated by the UN as the International Year of the Nurse and Midwife. It should give all of us the opportunity to acknowledge the nurses in our community and families.
Nurses are one of Australia’s most important and largest professional groups. We are blessed with over 380,000 nurses, a hugely important and deep reservoir of compassionate skill in our communities. And if we did not see or recognize this previously it has become so evident in this Covid year.
But we should not be surprised. Australia has a long history of its nurses putting themselves at risk in the service of the sick and dying. Their courage is one of the most endearing qualities of this remarkable profession.
In WW1 about 3,000 nurses volunteered to serve with the 1st A.I.F and 25 were killed, many from the influenza at the War’s end. In WW2 5,000 volunteered and tragically 78 died in service.
And now young men and women nurses have stepped forward again to protect the aged, sick and infirm from this unforgiving virus even in the face of real danger to themselves and their families.
We have asked a new generation of nurses to put themselves at risk in caring for those with the Corona virus and they responded with the same sustained bravery and courage as their parents and grandparents did.
So in this year it is imperative we as a community come together in supporting our nurses deal with a surprising and truly disturbing problem that is visited on too many of them every day, the unacceptable level of physical violence they have to bear.
A study commissioned by the NSW Nurses and Midwives Association released last July on violence against nurses and midwives was profoundly disturbing. The study found that just on half the participants had experienced an episode of violence in the previous week, and that a staggering 80% had experienced violence in the previous six months. The report makes clear that this is not just a public hospital problem as 69% of nurses in the private sector had also experienced violence in the previous six months.
Nurses see life in the raw and bone deep. They are not shrinking violets. They know that every shift has the potential to be confronting, even traumatic. Inevitably nurses are drawn into the web of family trauma that often accompanies hospitalization. This can place a nurse in the intimate centre of family coping with the death of a loved one.
Whilst suffering their own vicarious grief, nurses and midwives are often called on to protect the patient or parents or family and help them cope with the most distressing events many will ever face. In their grieving or frustration some families lash out and seek someone to blame. Too often the nurses and midwives receive an unfair share of blame and attack.
In the one shift a young nurse may have to cope with violence from an ice addict; a psychotic patient living out their despair or the pall of sadness that often surrounds a frail and elderly dementia patient caught in some delirium. Imagine coping with that for hours and then being abused and attacked by a patient upset over a delay in treatment, with the abuse often escalating to physical confrontation and violence.
Our nurses have many legitimate concerns over health care, but nothing frightens or damages them more than violence at work. The impact is personal, traumatic and often long lasting.
Our nurses and midwives are not trained cage fighters, but men and women who are practitioners of professional kindness. They cannot do their job without bringing more kindness to the workplace in one day than most of us contribute to ours in a year.
So this year, let’s celebrate our nurses and midwives, and thank them for their courage, but let’s also commit ourselves to do something practical for this most practical group of workers by ensuring they have a safe and violence free work place.
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