Our early service was supposed to start a week ago with eight nurses. Should, because nothing came of it. A colleague was ill. Another had to look after her child who was in quarantine. In a third, the rapid corona test that we all do before each shift was positive. In fact, only five nurses were able to start their service – the reality corresponded to 62.5 percent of the plan. This is too little. So that day, at 5:40 a.m., my cell phone rang, waking me up. It was the shift manager: “Pola, we need you today!”
The search for a replacement works reasonably well when it comes to failures on the following days. However, if someone calls in sick at short notice, compensation is almost impossible. Who can you reach in the middle of the night when there is a shortage of staff on the early shift? And anyone who jumps in on night duty needs to be able to breathe in the morning or afternoon to be able to sleep. Everything is not so easy. There were shifts in which I, as manager, spent an hour phoning around until I had a replacement. If nobody can be found, the only thing left is to reduce the number of beds in consultation with the medical profession in order to be able to maintain the quality of our care and not to endanger any patients.
Luckily things have changed since October. Since then we have been testing the “stand-by service”: on our days off, we can commit ourselves to stepping in in advance – all on a voluntary basis. Mostly part-timers like me sign up for such services, but some full-timers also sign up because they see the benefits of the project for all of us – I take my hat off to that! Because working 100 percent and also being on stand-by means a lot of working time.
Intensive care specialist Pola Gülberg from the Ebersberger district clinic.
(Photo: Peter Hinz-Rosin)
For the shift manager, this means an enormous organizational relief. A replacement can be arranged with just one call. The stand-by workers must be available approximately three hours before the shift. If there is still no call about 30 minutes after the start of the shift, no one will come. The service is paid for in the form of hours, which are credited to our working time account or paid out. The clinic lets us do that – a great thing!
Of course, the stand-by services come at the expense of privacy. But the fact that I step in if someone from the team falls ill is simply part of my job – that’s how I see it. If I now know when this could happen thanks to the stand-by duty roster, it also makes my planning easier. And sometimes there is no call at all, that was the case with me in December. There were already two by the end of January.
There have also been staff shortages in the past. But we’ve never had as many as in the omicron wave. Without our stand-by service, I can hardly imagine how our work could function. The fact that we sometimes have fewer nurses than planned despite the jumpers – like a week ago when there were six of us with me instead of eight – is currently not a problem, because we finally have free beds again and are not fully utilized.
Pola Gülberg is an intensive care nurse. In this column, the 37-year-old talks about her work at the district clinic in Ebersberg every week. The collected texts can be found below sueddeutsche.de/thema/Auf_Station.