Nurse Safety Media Release

Nurses and midwives in the Northern Territory are being forced to carry the consequences of systemic failure and it is putting their safety at risk every single day.
 
This week ANMFNT attended ED in RDH and were told that staff are working in conditions where threats, abuse and violence are not isolated incidents, but routine. ANMFNT have heard directly from members that incidents are so frequent they are no longer reported, because the reporting system is time-consuming and does not lead to meaningful change.

Security arrangements are inadequate and serve a decorative purpose. Contracted security staff are not able to touch patients meaning they are unable to respond effectively to violence, and nurses report delays of up to 15 minutes after activating duress alarms before a security guard attends. The system is so broken that the team leader in ED doesn’t even know that a nurse in triage has pressed the duress alarm until a nurse coordinator comes running through asking where the duress is. That is unacceptable.

ANMFNT was told that Emergency Department staff have reported these issues to NT worksafe with little to no action.
 
This week, a nurse reported that a patient said  ‘he was going to rape me that he was going to kill my children that if he ever saw me out side the hospital he would slit my throat’. Police witnessed this event and informed the nurse that reporting this threat wasn’t a priority and she was to report the threat via the 1300 number. As of yesterday that nurse had not been contacted by the police to follow up on this threat.

The member further stated “I have extreme concerns (and I'm not the only one), that a worker is going to be stabbed within the department, that one of my nurses who is set up to fail every single day due to the extreme workload and unsafe work environment they have to come to work in will commit suicide due to the ongoing psychological distress this causes them”. 

No worker should ever face this level of threat in their workplace and the ANMFNT have escalated this report to the NT Health department
 
Emergency departments are operating well beyond safe capacity. Nurses report running at crisis levels at all times, with patients waiting far beyond acceptable timeframes. Despite this, nurses continue to monitor and care for patients in waiting rooms because they refuse to let someone die waiting for care. They shoulder this burden and they genuinely fear that they will be held accountable if there is a sentinel event. I want to be clear – when a patient dies from inadequate care it will be a system failure and one that has been raised a number of times.
 
We are calling for immediate action for RDH Emergency Department:
 

1. An immediate investigation by NT WorkSafe.

 2. Immediate review of security capability and response times 
 3. Duress systems that alert nurse team leaders in real time 
 4. System-wide solutions to reduce unsafe pressure on emergency departments 

Let me be clear: nurses and doctors are not the problem. They are holding this system together under extraordinary pressure.
 
The Northern Territory Government must take responsibility. Continuing to rely on the goodwill of exhausted staff while conditions deteriorate is not leadership. You are directly responsible for nurses leaving the profession and that’s a disgrace. Nurses come into this profession with good intentions and leave with trauma and disillusion.
 
Our members deserve to be safe at work. That is the standard, and it is not negotiable.
 

Authorised by Heidi Crisp

Branch Secretary, ANMFNT

2/4/26