Ten past four nurses midwives have rallied outside Westmead Hospital today following revelations that the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit inside Westmead simply does not have enough resources. The NICU is
funded for forty four beds now. The Neonatal Intensive Care Unit is the unit inside Westmead that looks after the sickest of babies, babies who are premature, babies that need the most help, and it is forty four beds in size, but on a regular basis, the staff, the nurses there and the doctors they need to open it up to as much as fifty beds. So what they describe this is they have to double park the babies, triple park. And it's been suggested today that there are babies being
treated in the corridors of the hospital. There are babies being treated in storerooms. Now I've spoken with the government today and they say that they're not being treated in storerooms. And the Minister Ryan Park will go to Westmead Hospital this week once the budget's handed down and he will meet with some of the nurses and he will meet with the management. Jessica Charleston is a midwife at Westmead
Hospital and she's one of the midwives who's concerned. Thank you for joining me, Jessica, Thank you for having me. Tell me about your experience of treating babies in this unit.
So, first of all, I just want to highlight that we are talking about the neonatal intensive care unit within the adult hospital. Yep, we are not part of the Kids Hospital, We are not part of the Children's hospital network. We are part of Western.
This is the Westmeads standard hospital. But you're talking neonatal care, so babies who are the most neat.
Baby within the adult hospital. So there's been some confusion about which unit has been referred to.
And yeah, so this is the neonatal intensive care unit within Westmead. So tell me about your experience.
It's pretty scary sometimes walking in and sort of not knowing what you're going to do, what you're going to get for the day, walking into a bedspot and go it. Oh, there's some extra babies in here that they're meant to be plush. I've got an extra allocated extra babies than what I should be. This is a really sick baby and I've got to manage that really sick baby as well as another one, maybe two babies.
Is there an issue of its physical resources having the physical space there or is it a staffing problem.
It's both, it's both. We have physically run out of space in the unit that we have. We have forty four physical bedspots in the unit, and it's not unus for us to have fifty babies and with times going even higher than that. Our funding is currently to have twenty one staff on a shift and over the last probably four to six months, we're needing twenty four to twenty six. So is staff needing to do extras and over time to try and meet that demand. I mean
we rarely get there. That's staff trying and to do as much as they can.
There was a headline this morning about babies being treated in the corridor. Baby's being treated in it in a storeroom. Now the government's told me, no, they're not being treated in the storeroom. From your experience, is that true?
It's true. We have what we call what has always been known as our resource room, which started life as a storeroom where we kept our resuscatees that we used to treat critically unwell babies and was where we then were able to restock those resuscites and after there was an article in twenty eighteen. I believed after that the shelves from the storeroom were removed, but it's still the storeroom that we can have up to sort of two or three babies in.
Ryan part the health Minister. He's going to come out and see you guys later this week. What do you want to say to the health ministuff if you personally get the chance to meet with him, what do you want to say to Ryan Park.
I don't necessarily want to say anything. I just we would love the opportunity to show him what we're talking about. Yep, it's anyone like, it's very obvious what the issues are. We can show him how our daily staffing sheet that sort of shows how many shorts we are on a shift regularly, and we can show him baby's hammed into what is obviously one bed spot, having sort of two babies side by side. We can show him this store
room that we put babies in. We might even have an admission that sits out in the corridor while we try and move other babies to make room for this sort of unexpected admission that we often get.
Well, he's going to come later in the week and hopefully you can show him the exact reality of the situation. Thank you for your tom. Jessica, thank you very much. Jessica Charleston, who's a Union midwife, so she's met representative of the union, but she works here on the job. So it's the neonatal intensive key in it within Westmeat. So it has funding for forty four beds, but often they have to treat fifty babies at one time, and these are really sick babies, often born premature. These are
the babies who need the most health. Chris Min's the Premier, has responded to this today.
Some of the good signs that we're seeing is retention across the network is now where we were at prior to the COVID emergency. We are saving over ninety percent of people year or year from retiring or resigning from the public health system.
So Chris Minn says the issue is mostly about staffing, and Jessica says, yes, it's staffing as well, not just the physical layout of the hospital and the resources there. And the Premier's argument is they're now preventing nurses from resigning. Don't forget the Nurses and Midwives Association is still locked in the pay battle as well with the state government
and that's not resolved yet. That's before the Industrial Relations Commission and nurses are paid roughly seventeen percent more in Queensland.