LGH Staffing Woes Continue with Dire Staffing Shortages
8 September 2025
The Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation Tasmanian Branch today is continuing to support members at the Launceston General Hospital who are grappling with short staffing across multiple wards and units.
ANMF Branch Secretary Emily Shepherd said the ANMF was contacted yesterday by members in the Acute Medical Unit, extremely concerned about being able to deliver quality patient care when they only had 7 staff rostered staff in the afternoon instead of 11 nursing staff.
“Due to patient care requirements, 2 of the 7 nursing staff were required to provided 1:1 nursing care due to high acuity – leaving 5 nurses to care for 19 patients,” Ms Shepherd said.
“These staffing challenges were forecast to continue over the weekend.”
Ms Shepherd said the ANMF met with senior management and contacted the Chief Executive of Hospitals North to confirm that no additional patients would be admitted into the 4 vacant beds over the weekend as staffing was expected to be dire for the entire weekend to protect member safety and quality patient care.
“In addition, ANMF organisers attended the LGH up until 10pm last night after further contact was received from members in the Emergency Department and also in the Intensive Care Unit who reported short staffing challenges and members needing support to navigate their own safety and wellbeing and importantly that of their patients.
“The ANMF is extremely concerned that members continue to bear the brunt of failures of elongated recruitment processes, inappropriate workload and staffing benchmarking processes.
“This leads to excessive delays in approvals for hiring additional nursing staff to meet patient demand and poor planning to ensure sufficient staffing across the inevitable winter respiratory seasons.”
Ms Shepherd said the ANMF has close to 40 workload grievances across the State citing inappropriate staffing to meet patient and activity demand.
“We are continually attempting to resolve these through the existing workload grievance procedures at the local level.
“But inevitably, this leads to each ward and unit grievance being lodged with the Tasmanian Industrial Commission just to achieve minimum staffing levels which the State are required legally to provide.
“Members are quite justifiably irate that these inefficient and negligent processes continue to compromise staff and patient safety and the failure of this Government and those before it, continue to place nursing staff and their colleagues in untenable situations to delivery safe and quality care without appropriate resources to do so.
“It is the Governments responsibility to deliver public health services and ensure quality patient care.
“The accountability for these failures rest squarely at the feet of the Tasmanian Government.”
Ms Shepherd said while the ANMF continues to navigate these challenges with and for members, the ANMF shares members frustration.
“We will consider supporting members to take further action if required to ensure that safe staffing is achieved for members and patients alike.”