So I work on an acute adult mental health ward and they have recently changed our staffing ratio despite us all collectively saying that even the original staffing levels were unsafe at times.
It used to be 5+ patients allowed for 2 RMNs and 2 HCAs now they’ve updated it so it’s 9+ patients. 8 or less we drop a HCA.
Now on a perfect day 2 nurses and 1 HCA is manageable but as people who work in healthcare know they are very few and far between. If there’s no meetings, no incidents and no one on escorted leave then it’s manageable. But even if it’s like that meal times have one person on observations, one person supervising the dining room and one of the nurses doing lunchtime medication leaving no spare staff. On breaks that’s down to 2 staff on the ward. Given how unpredictable mental health care is we are aware how unsafe this is if something was to go wrong/ there’s an admission or anything else that takes staff off the ward.
Management are really unhelpful when it comes to staff voicing their concerns and kinda just go “its the way it is deal with it”
I don’t know what to do. 90% of the time it will probably be fine but there’s gonna be a time where it’s not going to be fine and there’s going to be a serious incident or something important won’t get done and it will come back on the floor staff not the management that reduced our staffing