04 May 2021  |   06:49am IST

Nurses demand more staff in COVID wards

Say that they are facing terrible problems handling the pandemic
Nurses demand more staff in COVID wards

Team Herald

PANJIM: The Trained Nurses’ Association of India Goa unit has written to the State Health Secretary with a request that extra nurses be appointed in the COVID units in all government hospitals. 

In the letter, they recalled that they have carried out repeated follow ups on this issue and that they had also written to the State Health Department with the same request last May. They asserted that this is necessary to tackle the COVID pandemic crisis in Goa. 

“As the country is facing the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, we, the nurses, have been facing terrible problems to handle the COVID crisis situation in all the hospitals, especially COVID units,” the association said in the letter.

“We have to mention that from day one we are struggling hard to reach out to every call of every admitted patient in the hospitals in spite of the existing acute shortage of nurses in the State and even with the lack of facilities,” the association added. 

“But after repeated requests also, the authorities seem to be not interested in settling our problems. The situation is so bad that sometimes one nurse has to look after 30 to 40 patients in the wards and more than 15,000 population (size) at the periphery level,” the association said.

They further pointed out that from the day the pandemic started the nurses in Goa have been giving their ‘100 per cent’ as far as nursing care for COVID patients is concerned in all the COVID hospitals. 

“In spite of that we are getting ill treatment by the patients and relatives at work,” they lamented.

They also referred to the recent incident that occurred last week in Goa Medical College and Hospital (GMC) where hospital staff were abused, an issue that the Goa Association of Resident Doctors (GARD) has raised with the State government and Health Minister recently. The association condemned this incident and pointed out that this is not the first time such types of incidents have occurred.


IDhar UDHAR

Idhar Udhar