Young nurse logs nearly 300 hours in one month at Sask. hospital

When Jacelyn Wingerter graduated from nursing school and started working in January, she expected she’d work a lot of hours and be tired.

She didn’t think she’d be logging nearly 300 hours in one month at Royal University Hospital.

“Every single day, our emergency department is over capacity,” the 22-year-old nurse said, describing a situation of 20 to 50 patients in the emergency department and eight to 10 ambulances outside at any given time because upstairs beds have already been filled.

Last week, Wingerter said several patients were stuck in the emergency room for 100 to 150 hours — about five or six days — waiting for a bed to open up. Those patients were already admitted, but there was no place to take them to, Wingerter said.

Stretchers for beds and small rooms without any luxuries are used for patients in the emergency department right now, with a limit of one visitor at a time. The situation leaves patients without the simple comforts they are afforded on a ward.

Wingerter said the situation is even more difficult because those patients waiting aren’t getting real one-on-one care.

“Most days, we don’t even have a code bed open,” she explained, sharing she saw a makeshift trauma bed assembled two weeks ago in the ambulance bay in case a code was called.

At the time, they had five hallway beds set up on top of patients in their rooms.

“It’s a lot to handle and we’re definitely not providing the care that our patients deserve,” Wingerter said about the dire situation.

“Their safety is compromised and so is ours because there are just so many people to look after and not enough hands.”

Wingerter has also seen paramedics spend entire shifts waiting to get a patient admitted to hospital.

It’s a situation caused by overcapacity and lacking staffing levels in Saskatoon hospitals like RUH. All departments, including emergency, are understaffed and struggling, Wingerter said.

“They’re full upstairs, they’re short-staffed (and) they can’t take people that fast,” she said. “It’s not just us that are suffering.”

A full-time schedule consists of 12 12-hour shifts in a month, amounting to 144 hours. In May, Wingerter logged an additional 146 hours on top of that, bringing her to 290 hours worked in the month with overtime.

“I actually was so exhausted that after one of my last shifts, I ended up falling down my stairs on my way to work,” she recalled.

Wingerter isn’t trying to complain — she’s still thrilled to be working her dream job and said it was her own choice to work those overtime hours. But the extreme hours she and other nurses are regularly working aren’t sustainable, she said.

“It basically killed me, working that many hours in the month,” she said.

The deep need for more nurses in Saskatchewan is overwhelming for those working, with no end in sight.

“We could literally pick up overtime every single day,” Wingerter said. “We could all work 365 days a year, 24/7 if we wanted to because of how short-staffed we are.”

Wingerter said she herself has cut back to a handful of overtime shifts a month on top of her 144 hours to try and take care of herself so she can keep doing the work she has always wanted to do.

But she said there is a guilt behind picking up overtime hours that all nurses feel. Daily emails ask nurses to pick up a new swath of shifts that need to be filled and often nurses prepared to clock out and head home are asked to extend their 12-hour days.

“Of course you can say no … but when you leave, seeing the department so short and that half of it had to close down … you do feel guilty,” Wingerter said.

She said the backlog is leading to more nurses realizing their limits with how much they can work. It’s been hard to foster morale, given that staff are so busy during their shifts they hardly have time to check in on each other.