Nurses at ULS Algarve warn that overload is affecting care

Nurses at the Algarve Local Health Unit (ULS) are overworked due to a lack of professionals and blame the administration for the deterioration of working conditions and the consequent implications for the safety of the care provided.

“We estimate that there is a shortage of 1,500 nurses in the region, according to the Safe Staffing Regulations of the Portuguese Nurses Association. The shortage of nurses has worsened in recent years, with direct implications for the quality and safety of care provided to the population and for the physical and mental health of nurses,” the Portuguese Nurses Union (SEP) reported in a statement.

The lack of professionals and the work overload to which nurses working at the ULS in the Algarve – which manages the hospitals in Faro, Portimão and Lagos and basic emergency services in the region – are subjected could lead them “to ask for an exemption from responsibility”, warned the union structure.

If the nurses ask to be excused from responsibility, it will be the ULS administration and, “ultimately, the Ministry of Health” who will be held responsible for the “absence of measures to minimize the problem”.

“It is common for nurses to have to work shifts to cover for others who, due to health problems, have had to justifiably take sick leave,” the union explained, stating that nurses feel the impact of work overload on their health.

Nurses/inhabitants ratio

The SEP compared the ratio predicted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ( OECD ), which is nine nurses for every thousand inhabitants, with that of Portugal, which has 7.9, and with that of the ULS Algarve, which has “only 4.8 nurses for every thousand inhabitants”.

There are services at the Algarve ULS where “there should be 11 nurses in a morning” and “there are only 7 to 8”, with the number of 11 “being below the Safe Staffing”, and there are situations in which “five nurses provided care to 40 hospitalized patients”, explained the union.

“In the afternoon and night shifts, these ratios are even more worrying” and he lamented the “lack of material resources essential to professional practice”, which causes “a strong impact on the provision of care, on the dignity of patients and on the ethical and legal responsibility of nurses”.

The nurses at the ULS in the Algarve “refuse to trivialise the risk of error due to excessive work and poor conditions”, but they reject being “accomplices in the deterioration” of the National Health Service and “refuse to work in conditions that also violate the principles of safety, quality and professional dignity” which, according to the union, the hospital administration is not managing to ensure.