A senior Welsh nurse has told ITV Wales that staffing is “the main problem” our NHS currently faces as hundreds of healthcare workers are off sick or isolating.

 

Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board has reported more than 500 staff have tested positive for coronavirus in the last seven days alone.

The Health Board said they are having to cope with this on top of the number of people off sick with other illnesses. They are relying on staff taking on extra shifts or overtime and using temporary workers to plug the gap.

Omicron has now been confirmed as the most dominant strain of coronavirus in Wales, with the variant accounting for 80% of cases in some areas of the country.

Mandy Jones, the Interim Secondary care Nursing Director at BCUHB said maintaining good staffing levels is crucial for them to continue safely running emergency and urgent care.

She said: “A major contributor for us being able to sustain services for emergency care is the staffing that we’ve got. So for example, this month compared to October-November, we’ve got double the amount of staff off.

“In the last seven days there’s been over 500 staff who’ve tested positive for Covid…In addition to that, we’ve got other sicknesses and since March there’s been about a 20% increase in the number of staff who are off as a total.”

When asked if there was a danger hospitals could be overwhelmed, Ms Jones said she could not say. She explained they have managed to maintain all the services they possibly can but “it is a big, big challenge”.

“We try and be as safe as we can, to provide the services that we need to for emergencies and urgent care,” she said.

“The consequence of that is that we constantly have to risk assess continuously, hour by hour, day by day, as to what services we can provide.

“We have to rely on staff doing additional shifts, overtime and also the use of temporary staffing workforce, which we’re very very grateful of but we would not be able to maintain emergency and urgent services without our phenomenal staff.

“It is a challenge, and a lot of staff including myself and my team included are tired. People are tired.

“But we are here to do a job, we try and do it well and we try and be as safe as we possibly can because we are responding to a pandemic that nobody thought would sustain the longevity it has.”

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