krusey

Great guys! to have a hospital that had only one patient to care for. In the dim dark ages, had happened one Christmas day for 2 hours. However, have a 39 bed rural base hospital, who caters to the remote hospitals up to 10 beds. Very busy, AE, Med/Surg, OT, Maternity, Paed, and General and Pallative. Have a great need for Midwives in this country town. Have too many babies, (must be something in the water!) When only a few patients on the ward, most hit the study books, we are 3 hours from a major city hospital. Takes Royal Flying Doctors Services up to 7 hours to retrieve a critical patient as they are often so busy themselves. Every case is done on severity of the illness/trauma. krusey

We must be a bit lucky, we have a Nurse's union that is fighting on the nurses behalf, if we do not get our 1/2 hour break (uninterrupted I might add) we get paid time and a half. Occasionally if the ward is extremely busy we might miss out, but when the ward is slow we are able to leave early or have extended meal/smoko breaks.