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The Death of a Dream Team - An Autopsy
How poor management destroyed a nursing team over a decade — and the consequences thereof
Tucked away in the mountains, in an idyllic valley, there’s a little hospital where I am a nurse. It specialises in nothing more than bringing care to the community locally. On the single in-patient ward acute medicine, surgical cases, rehabilitation and chronic care rub shoulders. All patients from this range are cared for by the same nursing and medical team. The windows of the patient rooms overlook the mountains on the other side of the valley, rising steeply to 2500m, and the sound of cowbells tinkles in on the cool mountain breeze.
When I started there nearly a decade ago, cases ranged from hip replacements to post-coronary stenting care, to palliative oncology, to alcohol withdrawal — complete with delirium tremens — to care of the elderly. We had a small High-Dependency Unit (HDU) which was almost always occupied, and a small emergency room.
The nursing team was largely relatively young but with a core of older colleagues, and although there was some turnover, especially in the younger staff, it was sustainable. A good proportion of the hospital team, at all levels of training and across departments, had been at the hospital for over five years. The team worked well…
