In Photos | 'Overworked & Exhausted': Delhi Nurses Share Their Woes

Ahead of International Nurses Day, FIT brings you a glimpse into the lives of nurses from across Delhi hospitals.

FIT brings you a glimpse into the lives of three nurses from across Delhi hospitals.

(Photo: Garima Sadhwani/FIT)

Anita Mathew (57) is a Senior Nursing Officer at New Delhi's GB Pant Hospital. She's worked here for the past 30 years in the psychiatry ward. Most of her days involve patient care, handling their medications, and occasionally arranging electroconvulsive therapy. She smiles as she explains it to FIT, "Vo bijli ke jhatke dete hai vo (We have to give electric shocks to patients.)"

(In picture: Anita Mathew)

Devender Jain (42) is a Nursing Officer at the same hospital. For the past 16 years, his daily routine has consisted of going on rounds to check on the patients admitted in the post-intervention ICU, closely monitoring their vitals, and coordinating with doctors for emergency treatment.

Each day, he takes care of the patients’ medications, their injections, drips, or any IV needs. He adheres to all their nursing needs and patient care. He says that being a nurse has taught him a lot, enriched him not just as a professional but in his personal capacity too.

For Mathew, nursing has been more than a profession. She says it has taught her to take care of not just patients but their families. “Patient care requires a lot of sympathy and empathy,” says she. 

But not all’s rosy in their lives as nurses. On most days, they say they can’t take a break while on shift. That means there are days when both Mathew and Jain work continuously for eight hours without eating anything or without even getting to use the washroom. There are even more days when they have to work a double shift or when the shift gets extended by 4-5 hours.

Why so, you ask? The hospital is severely understaffed, Jain says. There are nurses who have tens of weekly offs, earned leaves, and casual leaves pending or lying unapproved because there’s no one to pick their share of work. He says that in the last nine years, only one recruitment drive has been conducted in the hospital. 

Jain tells FIT, “The patient to nurse ratio is very poor. We’re working at only 30 percent strength of the required workforce all over Delhi. We’re overworked, understaffed, and working under a lot of pressure, even in the ICU and emergency wards. At GB Pant Hospital, we are a team of 800 nursing staff but ideally we require about 2000 nurses.”

He goes on to say, “The State Inspection Unit norms are not followed in regard to how many nurses you require in each ward. The government is ignorant towards patient welfare, nurses' concern, and the smooth functioning of the hospitals. They’re building new hospitals and instead of recruiting people, they’re diverting the staff there from the existing facilities, increasing the burden on all of us.”

There’s also no work-life balance in the profession due to this very season. Mathew says she’s often torn between work and family, with no time for the latter. This makes it all the more difficult to cope with the mental distress that is a part of this job. 

The problem seems to be consistent across hospitals too. Chirayu (name changed), a nursing officer at the Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Hospital in Delhi, shares that when he first joined the hospital, there was a severe shortage of nurses due to which he was forced to work in multiple departments.

The problem is still persistent as there’s still a crunch. He tells FIT, "We don’t have enough nurses to run a specialised hospital. In the NICU, we have to maintain a 1:1 ratio. But the current nurse to patient ratio is 1:7 in our ICUs, which increases pressure."

There are other problems too. Jain says that in most hospitals, there are no proper changing rooms for nurses, no rest rooms, and not even facilities for safe drinking water. 

As much as she loves being a nurse, Mathew too realises that there are severe gaping holes when it comes to the profession. For one, she’s not too delighted at the way nurses are treated. “In India, nurses are thought to be secondary, our education/training is not trusted enough by people to let us care for them. They think the only things we can do are giving medicines.”

Chirayu agrees. He shares that in recent years, approximately 60-70 of his colleagues have moved abroad to pursue nursing careers. Why? "Job satisfaction is not only determined by your pay. Timely promotions, appreciation for patient care, and the job quality also matter. In India, hospitals are concerned about their patients but not about their staff," he says. 

They share that while most days their work either goes unnoticed/unrecognised by people – doctors, patients, families of the patients – some days they are appreciated. This has significantly increased after COVID, shares Jain. But so have the violence and abusive threats. Jain says, “There have been so many times when patients have been violent because they thought we were not prioritising their emergency, but we’re so short-staffed, we can’t attend to everyone at once.”

Maybe that’s the reason that the governments don’t take nurses seriously, because people don’t as well, they think. Otherwise there would be some sort of recuperation, right? Mathew shares that she’s been in the profession for 30 years now. But it was only last year that she was promoted to a Senior Nursing Officer. 

This distresses Jain too. He’s been a nurse for 16 years now without one single promotion. For him, there has been a growing disinterest since his job has now been the same for so many years.

At LNJP too, Chirayu has been a nursing officer since 2011 without any promotion.

He shares, "There are no new recruitments, no promotions. The problem is that our promotion files are kept pending for years on end by the administrative departments without taking any action. We want our contractual staff to be regularised, to go back to the Old Pension Scheme, some sense of job security but to no avail."

This is a cause of concern among nurses, Jain shares.

But to be fair, in their daily lives, this becomes just one of the many things distressing them – mind you, these are people who saw sickness and death very closely during the pandemic.

And while all of them do say that they are grateful for the love the nursing community received during COVID-19 from the country, they feel that it hasn’t transpired into anything beyond words. Mathew clearly remembers how during the first wave of the pandemic, any sort of contact with health workers was shunned by their own neighbours and people in their own societies.

Chirayu was stationed at LNJP's COVID Emergency ward during the pandemic. Even after months have passed, he can't forget what it was like being in the hospital during those times. He says, "There were new guidelines every hour as more information was being discovered about the virus. We did not know what to do. There was fear, we were seeing people die every day, our colleagues die every day. There was a lot of grief to process but a lot of work too."

For Jain, Mathew, Chirayu and many like them, the psychological trauma took a toll. Jain feels that when the nursing community needs help, there’s no hearing, no redressal, no acknowledgement. He says, “If you help us, you won’t just boost our morale, you’ll also significantly increase the condition of healthcare in India.”

Mathew agrees. For her, this lack of support for nurses shows something else. She says, “It feels like we were being appreciated, acknowledged only so that we don’t stop working as frontline workers.”

Mathew says, “No matter how many hospitals the government makes, unless there are people to run it, how will you improve healthcare? Patient care and healthcare workers are the only ones suffering.”

Doctors are at the forefront of healthcare. They deserve all the accolades and respect they get. But if you’ve ever been to a hospital, you’d know that any hospital (or any health facility, for that matter) would crumble if not for the nursing staff. 

Ahead of International Nurses Day on 12 May, FIT brings you a glimpse into the lives of three nurses from across Delhi hospitals.