“We don’t have enough IC nurses to do that,” said Bianca Buurman, the minister’s chief adviser in the field of nursing in NRC. “We now have 3,800. We should have 1,650 more.”
Nurses back to ward
Normally, the Netherlands has 1150 IC beds, although that number was increased with difficulty during the corona crisis to 2,200. Nurses were responsible for three or four patients, where there would normally be two.
In order to answer the great pressure, other nurses, surgical assistants and anesthesiologists have joined in the past few weeks. Now that the peak of the corona wave has passed, they return to their own departments. Hospitals do not want other procedures and surgeries to be postponed there any longer.
–
–
An IC bed must be monitored day and night by an IC nurse. “You need six FTEs for one bed,” said Gerton Heyne, president of the Nurses and Nurses Professional Association.
Upskilling
Heyne knows that the 1,650 new ICU nurses have not just been found. Further training is required. “They must have eighteen months of training above their regular nursing training.” It would therefore certainly take a year and a half before the Netherlands has enough up-to-date ICU nurses.
Diederik Gommers, chairman of the Dutch Association of Intensivists, underlines the problem. “This can be difficult and perhaps unfeasible for nurses. But we have to talk about it and work together for it.”
–
–
