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Winter 2006

Alarm in Spencer Clinic

Members at the North West Regional, Burnie Campus’ Psychiatric Unit, Spencer Clinic, have been campaigning for personal duress alarms for several years.

Alarms became an issue of urgent concern for members last year when several workers were injured by patients.

However, despite prolonged negotiation, management is yet to provide duress alarms for staff.

Clinical Nurse Roman Tomaszewski explains that "we have had some trial duress systems but they have proved totally useless. Currently, if you are in an emergency situation you yell at the top of your lungs."

"As you can imagine, you get patients in the Clinic who are totally unpredictable and we need a means by which we can discreetly get assistance."

Staff are seeking a personal duress alarm system that works in a similar way to a pager - letting other staff know if someone is in trouble and what part of the ward they are in.

The occupational health and safety risks faced by staff as a result of the lack of duress alarms were also exacerbated by inadequate staffing levels at the Clinic.

As a result, in August 2005, management agreed to use agency nurses to supplement staffing levels until duress alarms could be installed. However, rather than installing an alarm system, the agency staff have remained, presumably at significant cost.

Roman believes that the only thing that has saved workers from a serious incident thus far is the skill of the nursing staff.

"It's been a bit of a bureaucratic nightmare. A month ago we were led to believe that a contract had been signed off on to install an alarm system, but the process must have stalled because there has been no real progress from hospital management since the middle of March this year."

"I would estimate that hospital management has spent close to half a million dollars on agency staff when they could have spent a fraction of that on a duress alarm system."