Health workers paint dire picture of hospital systems

SYDNEY: Healthcare workers say they are struggling to care for patients with more than 8,500 medical staff across four states in Covid isolation as Omicron puts added pressure on the system.
In New South Wales, 2,650 healthcare staff are currently in isolation.
Another 2,477 are isolating in Queensland, 1,873 in Victoria and 1,557 in Western Australia (WA), according to the latest numbers.
Staff working across the country paint a damning picture of a struggling healthcare system.
One nurse in regional WA said she had never seen it so bad, with some patients forced to wait days to be moved out of emergency departments.
“Our emergency department has become everything: it’s the GP (general practitioner) centre, it’s the high intensive care unit for the region, it’s become the locked mental health facility, even though it doesn’t have security,” she said.
“Wait times for serious priority one cases can be days and days.
“They’ll be sitting in ED (emergency department) without anything we can do for them, other than house and feed them because we don’t have the specialist skills.”
The nurse, who was concerned she could lose her job if she was identified, said she was speaking out because the public needed to know how bad the situation has become. Her regional hospital was not dealing with Covid cases but was struggling because the bigger hospitals in Perth were backlogged.