Workers are leaving Canberra Health Services (CHS) in droves, and staff would not recommend their workplace as a good place to work, the Canberra Liberals claim.
Rachel Stephen-Smith, ACT Minister for Health, said the ACT Government was working with senior leadership and staff every day to ease workforce pressure.
Liberal MLA Leanne Castley, Shadow Minister for Health, Mental Health and Wellbeing, said that according to FOI documents her party had obtained, more than one in eight workers plan to leave Canberra’s “crisis-plagued” health system within two years.
The November 2021 workplace culture survey of 3,852 CHS staff, including almost 1100 nurses and midwives, found 13 per cent intended to leave within two years, up from 12 per cent two years earlier.
Similarly, only 39 per cent believed workloads were “fair and equitable”; only 37 per cent said CHS recognised their achievements; and 45 per cent believed there were good career opportunities.
When asked if they would recommend CHS as a good place to work, the staff response was a negative rating of -15.1; more than double the November 2019 score of -7.2.
Ms Castley called the report “damning”.
“This report is a wake-up call for the Labor-Greens government that our health system is bleeding staff,” she said.
“Nurses feel undervalued and are leaving in droves. No wonder Canberra has the worst emergency department and elective surgery wait times in the country.”
Ms Stephen-Smith acknowledged that the workload was “already incredibly high”.
“It is a real challenge, and it has been a real challenge,” she said, “particularly for those people who have been working at the pointy end of the front line in the Intensive Care Unit in the Emergency Department over the last couple of years. It has been tough work.”
But, rather than leaving the health system altogether, many staff had moved to a different role, Ms Stephen-Smith said. Again, if people left, their positions were filled. For instance, 25 nurses left the Canberra Hospital ICU, but 84 nurses were recruited.
Canberra Hospital, Ms Stephen-Smith said, had a consistent recruitment campaign to bring in new nurses and allied health professionals, and find pathways for student nurses who had worked in vaccination facilities.
Similarly, the minister said, the ACT Government had committed to 70 additional full-time equivalent nursing positions to improve nurse patient ratios, and was working with the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation to implement the first stage.
The government would close the AIS Arena COVID-19 Mass Vaccination Clinic at the end of this month, instead of keeping it open through June, to bring nursing staff and students into frontline healthcare services, and “take a little bit of that pressure off,” Ms Stephen-Smith said.
