Who wants to be employed at a place where you never get the opportunity to do a good job? Where you cry on the way home because you let vulnerable, sick people suffer because you didn’t have the capacity to help them? The workload and responsibilities today are so great that it is no wonder that health personnel are fleeing the municipal health services. Just like all other workers, healthcare personnel can also choose who they want to sell their labor to. One in five nurses leaves the profession in the first ten years after graduating. We run out of healthcare personnel long before we run out of money. In Trondheim, Sonja sits and waits to receive a phone call that her husband Jan (73) has fallen and killed himself. Sadly, Sonja has good reason to fear this, even though Jan is somewhere where he will be well looked after. Jan has Parkinson’s disease and is unable to press an alarm or communicate his needs. From May to October, Jan has fallen 23 times in the nursing home where he lives. Sonja says that staffing is so low that the employees have to leave Jan alone for large parts of the shift to help others. This is even though they know that the risk of him falling and injuring himself is great. Many relatives around the country are in the same desperate situation as Sonja. Through several cases, news has told about the conditions at Ullern health center in Oslo, where patients experience neither the medical follow-up nor the care they need. One patient said that he stayed up at night crying for help, without getting it. On one occasion, he estimates that he lay for two and a half hours at night, without anyone coming. It is not difficult to understand that the nights are long and cruel when you constantly fear for your own life because the help you need does not come. At night, there are only six employees who take care of 96 patients at Ullern Health Center – only two of these are nurses. In Trondheim, the standard is five employees per 100 patients. This is planned normal staffing, not due to sickness absence among employees. In many of the country’s municipalities, the staffing in both nursing homes and in home care is completely marginal, often without personnel with the right skills present to provide the professionally sound and caring health care that patients actually need. At Ullern health center, a third of the nursing positions are unfilled. When staffing is so tight, the nearest staff will be in a conflict of simultaneity at all times. Our shop stewards in Trondheim municipality describe it as many employees going home with stretch marks in their hearts after not having given the patients what they really need. Since the introduction of the Cooperation Reform, increasingly larger tasks have been transferred from the specialist health service to the municipalities. The patients are sicker than before, both mentally and somatically. Almost the entire increase in expenditure on municipal health and care services over the past eight years can be attributed to population growth, price growth and transferred tasks. Municipal round-the-clock care places have in practice become mini-hospitals for those who need comprehensive health care and round-the-clock health follow-up. The patients are sicker, but the staffing is the same as 10–20 years ago. On the Søndagsrevyen 11/12/22 I announced that it was “code red” for the municipal health services. In Politisk Kvarter the following Tuesday, the Center Party’s Hans Inge Myrvold rejected that there is a crisis. He called it a challenge. But no crisis. A startling statement. Health councilor Robert Steen in Oslo said in Dagsrevyen 30.12.22: “We are a society that is getting more and more elderly in need of care and health services and fewer and fewer people who can provide those services. This puts pressure on our health centres, our nursing homes and our hospitals. (…) This is not an Oslo problem, it is going to be a national problem. We need to address that problem more broadly instead of shuffling patients between us. That is my great concern as we enter 2023”. Robert Steen is right that it is more than an Oslo problem, this is already a challenge across the country. The problem cannot be solved by shuffling tasks more or less aimlessly between different groups of health personnel, without assessing what competence is needed for the various tasks. It is also not solved by hiring temporary workers who were previously permanent employees, at a higher price for the public sector. The health personnel commission will arrive in a month’s time. Nor will they come up with any “quick fix” for the challenges the Nurses’ Association and others have been warning about for decades. The most important task for the responsible politicians is to ensure that those who train for the health and care services actually want to work there. The right expertise and sufficient staffing are the key to succeeding in this.
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The staffing is not sufficient – Statement
