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'Moral distress is killing us': Ont. nurse on hospital staffing shortages amid Omicron wave

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An Ontario registered nurse says health-care workers are “broken completely,” exhausted and under intense pressure amid a rise in hospitalizations.

“It’s definitely a state of emergency right now,” Birgit Umaigba, an ICU nurse and clinical course director at Centennial College, told CTV News Channel on Tuesday. “These people show up for one shift and they’re treated so poorly because of the nursing shortages. And then they don’t show up for the next day.”

Umaigba said there are times when patients go into cardiac arrest but there simply aren’t enough nurses to properly address it.

“We have standard of care that we really want to follow through… and that becomes really difficult when we don’t have the staff to be able to implement any of that,” she said. “So the moral distress is also killing us.”

For more of the interview, watch interview attached to this article.
 

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