An emergency department doctor says her "heart sinks" walking onto her shifts at Dunedin Hospital as she sees desperate, in pain and anxious patients lining the corridors, waiting for hours to be seen.
Her experience is like many working in New Zealand hospital's emergency departments, which are under increasing pressure with wait times soaring, minimal staff and a fatigued workforce.
A survey of 1372 ED staff from around New Zealand showed Aotearoa's district health boards are experiencing high burnout rates among emergency clinicians, leading to negative patient outcomes.
Dr Rosa Tobin Stickings, who works at Dunedin Hospital, this morning told Breakfast it was "exhausting seeing people suffering all the time".
"At the moment I am incredibly busy on the daily in our emergency department in Dunedin. You'll walk onto a shift and your heart just sinks when you see patients in corridors and you know patients are already waiting for six, even longer, hours to be seen and you know they're going to still be waiting throughout your shift.
"It's unsafe for them, they're waiting in pain and distress and anxiety out in the waiting rooms or in the corridors and there's potential that they get sicker while they wait for us to see them," she said.
"No healthcare worker gets into the job to see people suffer, we want to be able to help people in a timely fashion. It's exhausting seeing people suffering all the time and if you feel like you're not able to do your job in a way that you'd like to, to get to them quicker and to be able to sooth them sooner, it can get you down."
Tobin Stickings said she's worked as a doctor for four years, and in emergency for a year-and-a-half, and that the work was physically, mentally and emotionally challenging.
She said her shifts were "long and very busy", sometimes with one 15 to 20 minute break in a more than 10-hour shift.
"That all takes it's toll on you as an individual," she said.
But it's the same story around the country.
The situation is so dire in Wellington Hospital's emergency department that nurses have issued a notice to management to fix unsafe working conditions at the department as it struggles with huge demand.
Capital and Coast District Health Board says there have been capacity issues for months, with the emergency department regularly exceeding "well over 100 per cent occupancy".
Dr Jordan Gibbs, who works at Wairau Hospital in Marlborough, also on Breakfast this morning, said it doesn't matter the size of the department, the "tsunami of patients" coming through is still there across the country.
"We want to do our job properly, we want to do our patients justice and we don't often have the time to be able to do it to the extent that we'd want to," she said.
Due to the demand, Gibbs also said it was the norm to miss breaks in her hospital.
"Usually I just drink coffee on the run, in fact I've taken to bringing in trays of coffee when I arrive knowing damn well we probably won't get a break so at least I can give people a coffee when we start," she said.
"But there's nothing worse than walking down that corridor at the start and patients, they all look at you hoping that you'll be the one that comes and sees them soon, but that's all of them.
"While an emergency department is our every day, for most people in an emergency department it's one of the worst days of their life, they're not there because they're happy, they're there because they're miserable, they're in pain, they've had a stroke or a heart attack or a trauma."
So, what's the solution?
ED doctors are calling for better access to primary care to prevent patients overloading the emergency department.
Gibbs said she's had patients who had to wait two weeks or couldn't afford to see their GP, so came straight to emergency.
"My heart breaks for those patients, they're not trying to burden us, they're trying to deal with their own health," she said.
Gibbs also said she wants to see increased staffing and to have more bed spaces for patients so they're not lining the corridors of New Zealand's hospitals or waiting in ambulance beds, thus preventing them from responding to other jobs.
"We have a lack of space and a lack of staff."
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