Nurses at the Dhulwa Mental Health Unit cannot provide proper care for unwell patients due to failings of the ACT Government, the Australian Nurses and Midwifery Foundation (ANMF) – ACT Branch said today.

Earlier this week, the ANMF – ACT Branch called for an urgent inquiry into operations at Dhulwa Mental Health Unit, following allegations of violence and terror at the medium security facility over the past six months.

“Nurses at the Unit are saying that time is up for the ACT Government to respond to the ANMF’s call for an inquiry into Dhulwa’s operations,” said branch secretary Matthew Daniel.

Nurses reported being left to cope with an unwell patient who had not been properly assessed and admitted, Mr Daniel said. “Yet another example of the failings at Dhulwa.”

According to Mr Daniel, nurses said there was no clear care plan, and minutes earlier, the patient had reportedly been delivered to the facility in handcuffs.

Nurses protested to management about the failure to comply with policies and had to bring management’s attention to severe short staffing, but their concerns were rejected, he said.

“How long must these incidents keep coming?” Mr Daniel asked. “Our Nurses have had enough and want the ACT Government to not just listen, but act and do so immediately.”

Will Canberra’s nurses go on strike?

“We will be guided by our members, and we work within the legal framework which requires the ANMF to meet certain thresholds before we would see Nurses and Midwives walking off the wards,” Mr Daniel said.

“Our members will be considering other actions to have their voices heard. The community knows that Nurses and Midwives have been at the forefront of the pandemic, and Nurses and Midwives believe they have the support of Canberrans.”

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An ACT Government spokesperson said that all ‘consumers’ (patients) admitted to Dhulwa underwent all necessary assessments before they arrived.

“There has been a significant reduction in occupational violence incidents at Dhulwa in the last two weeks, which reflects the ongoing effort of CHS leadership and team members on the ground to prevent and manage occupational violence,” the spokesperson said.

An all-staff forum was held on Friday to ensure Dhulwa staff were kept informed about occupational violence strategies, knew where to go to seek advice or share concerns, and felt supported.

“We’d like to acknowledge the exceptional work team members in our mental health units do every day to support vulnerable members of our community,” the spokesperson said. “Safety of team members is Canberra Health Services’ highest priority.”

Earlier in the day, Rachel Stephen-Smith, ACT Minister for Health, said the ACT Government was talking to the ANMF and staff about easing workload pressures across the ACT health system.

Ms Stephen-Smith acknowledged the ACT health system was “under pressure”.

“There is no doubt that our hospitals, particularly Canberra Hospital and Calvary Public Hospital, are both very busy at the moment,” she said. “Our staff are working very hard, and we recognise the workload pressure that that creates, and the distress that that means for staff. And so we’re looking very hard at where we can access additional staffing, particularly nursing staff.”

But reducing activity in one area in order to free up more resources would lead to a backlog, Ms Stephen-Smith said.

During the 2020 pandemic, for instance, 500 non-urgent elective surgeries at Calvary were postponed; last year, Canberra Health Services delivered more than 15,300 elective surgeries – “Way higher than we had ever done before, but, of course, people worked hard to deliver that,” she said.

“We really want to avoid doing that as much as we possibly can because of the impact on patients of those kinds of delays in their surgery, and the fact that we then need to catch that up.

“Every time we pause that activity, we will then need to catch up. Those are the considerations that we need to balance.”

The ACT Government was bringing new graduates into the workforce “at a greater rate than we’ve ever done before,” Ms Stephen-Smith said – but, she noted, those graduates need supervision, training, and support.

“How do we ensure that we can retain our experienced staff members? How do we ensure that we’re taking the pressure off them as much as we possibly can, recognising their value and ensuring they feel supported so that they do stay in our system? It is not just a challenge for the ACT. This is a challenge nationally, and indeed internationally.”

International recruitment might be an answer, an approach Victoria is adopting. The ACT Government had committed to implement nursing ratios: it planned to recruit 400 more frontline healthcare workers by 2024, of whom the first 50 began working last month, with 40 more by the end of June.

The next round of enterprise bargaining will concern what stage two of ratios will look like.

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