RIH nurse creates artwork depicting healthcare worker struggle, sorrow

Photo: Contributed

A nurse at Royal Inland Hospital said she created this piece of artwork to depict the struggle and sorrow healthcare workers are feeling.

Seeing co-workers “heartbroken” by conditions at Royal Inland Hospital — and fearing the community isn’t hearing healthcare workers’ concerns — one nurse says she created a piece of art to express the sorrow she and her colleagues are feeling.

The nurse, who said she works at the hospital, asked that her name not be published due to concerns about repercussions from her employer.

The nurse said in an email to Castanet she created the piece a few weeks ago, before news broke that a 70-year-old woman died after waiting six hours in RIH’s emergency department.

“The art depicts the sorrow nurses are feeling with this failure to our community members who need healthcare services at RIH," she said.

"The new hospital building being constructed is put on a pedestal. This new building is referred as the ‘patient care tower,’ yet patient care is so appallingly ignored in real time."

The faceless nurses portrayed with tape across their mouths is “symbolic of us not being seen or heard by upper management, and being unable to speak out without retribution.”

She said nurses are heartbroken, especially as they have been raising concerns to upper management for years with “no resolution or communication from leadership what they are doing to improve conditions at RIH.”

“It appears leadership was only focused on the optics of having a brand new building; one with updated electronic patient charting and records. They have no means of physically running the new patient care tower successfully with our current staffing challenges, yet they move ahead without any concern to how desperate and dangerous things are in our current situation and building,” she said.

The nurse said she is considering leaving her profession.

“I cannot carry this moral distress much longer," she said.