Nurses in Mater Dei Hospital’s Cardiac Medical Ward fear patients are not getting the care they deserve due to the carers’ heavy workload.

“I used to look forward to going to work but now I dread it. There is so much work, it is hard to care for the patients’ needs,” a frustrated nurse, who works on the ward, said.

Cardiac Medical is one of the biggest wards in the hospital, with a total of 32 beds, eight of which are monitor beds that screen the electrical activity of the heart and are reserved for acute care patients.

Sometimes, one nurse said, the staff assigned to the “normal beds” had 12 patients per nurse, which in other wards would correlate to two nurses per ward. “We have no time for holistic care. They expect more from us but we cannot give more,” the nurse said.

Consultant cardiologist Albert Fenech, head of the Cardiology Department, had only words of praise for the nurses.

“It is most certainly the busiest ward in Mater Dei but I think the staff there is the hardest working team in hospital,” he said, adding that he thought they were managing well and he never came across patients who were lacking attention.

“The team most certainly is overworked and under pressure but, in spite of this, they are still managing to deliver a high standard of care to the patients,” Prof. Fenech said.

He said the ratio of one nurse to 12 patients only happened at night, when there was less work because consultants were not doing the rounds. He also pointed out that most departments were understaffed at this time of year as many employees took leave in summer.

Things would get better with the advent of new nurses being employed by the hospital, Prof. Fenech said.

Nurses said a letter was sent in May to the managerial nursing staff highlighting their difficulties and asking for action to be taken to improve the situation.

The nurses wrote that the “staff are feeling burnt out” and, as a result, there is an increase in sick leave due to the high stress levels, making it harder to cover staff shortage problems.

The nursing staff wrote they felt they were at a disadvantage compared to nurses working in other wards and that this situation could lead them to request a transfer.

The situation since May remained the same and the staff are planning to meet with the nursing union next week.

“The management and doctors don’t understand us,” a nurse said. “The workload increases, yet we remain the same number of staff.”

Another said there was a vacancy of one nurse per shift, which was promised to the ward, but, due to other priorities of staffing, these had not yet been allocated.

The ward admits patients of about 30 medical consultants and sometimes has patients who require “constant watch” and others monitoring, such as blood pressure, pulse and temperature being checked every two hours. In addition, the monitor area required two nurses to cover the eight beds, which the nurses said “is impossible” sometimes given their workload.