NURSING staff at Morriston Hospital’s emergency department likened it to working in a war zone and being in a third-world country, a meeting has heard.
Their views were relayed by colleagues Charlotte Gallivan and Joanne Fowler, who told Swansea Bay University Health Board members what it was like to work there.
There were 7,523 emergency admissions to Morriston Hospital in December – 242 per day on average – compared to 6,889 in December 2023.
Ms Gallivan – a senior sister – described the emergency department as a harsh environment.
“There’s not one shift at the moment that I don’t have a staff nurse crying,” she said.
Ms Gallivan said colleagues were under “immense pressure” and didn’t feel they could give patients the care they wanted.
Verbal abuse from patients and relatives, she said, was rising and more security would help.
Ms Gallivan said there times when up to 12 patients were in inappropriate areas of the department and were “touching basically”, which meant no infection control.
She described having to choose between three acutely unwell patients after managing to find a bed for one of them, leaving the other two in “serious danger”.
Ms Gallivan said the department ran low on staff daily and the waiting room was now a clinical area.
One patient last week, she said, was waiting 146 hours and during that time needed nursing care.
She added: “If we just had a few more staff we could safely look after these patients.”
Senior nurse Ms Fowler said if she had a pound for very time she apologised during a shift, she would have a “nice little bonus”.
She said the emergency department team was very strong when she joined in summer 2022 and for a short time no agency or bank staff were needed.
Ms Fowler said the position changed last April and claimed staffing levels began to fall.

Colleagues left for other Band 5 nursing roles, she said, and several went to work at Llanelli’s Prince of Wales Hospital.
“This has a huge a knock-on effect,” she said.
Ms Fowler said she was responsible for five very unwell resuscitation patients recently and she didn’t feel confident of going on a break as two colleagues, though both “lovely”, didn’t have the experience to look after them.
One of them, she said, had come from the intensive care unit and had never set foot in the emergency department before.
Senior nursing staff were spread thinly, said Ms Fowler, and newly-qualified nurses needed a lot of support.
She said she often ran out of trolleys and oxygen, ran short of “cardiac leads” and encountered “very surreal” situations such as going outside in the rain at 3am to give an ambulance patient an intravenous medication and finding the ambulance had moved.
Ms Gallivan and Ms Fowler said nursing colleagues compared their work to being in a war zone, a third-world country, and playing Russian roulette.
But there was also positive feedback about working there. Nursing staff praised colleagues’ efforts, described the team as “amazing”, and found the variety of the work very rewarding.
“Absolutely love our team,” said one nurse. “They are what gets me up in the morning at 5am and make me want to come to work.”
Another nurse said it was an honour to help patients through an uncertain time.
“Sometimes the outcome is good and the feeling you get when someone is told their loved one is going to be okay is just the best feeling ever,” they said.
“Sometimes the outcome is bad, but we are the nurses who stand by those loved ones and hold their hands.”
Ms Gallivan and Ms Fowler said having more more highly-trained staff would help, as would having a housekeeper to do things like oversee breakfast for patients before Red Cross volunteers arrived later in the morning.
Health board members thanked the duo for their candour, the work they and their colleagues did, and said they felt the situation described was not acceptable for patients or staff.
A representative from patient watchdog group, Llais, said the picture portrayed was similar to other emergency departments in Wales and there needed to be more capacity within social care to alleviate hospital pressures.
Independent board member Jean Church said trying to ensure patients accessed the most appropriate unscheduled care service could help.
Reena Owen, another independent member, said it was a fact the Swansea Bay population was getting older and frailer and there would always be those who needed emergency department care.
“We have to get the capacity right,” she said. “There is also an issue with the (emergency department) building at the moment.”
Stephen Spill, health board vice-chairman, said staffing levels should not be unsafe and while the use of agency nurses was restricted for financial reasons it had not been cut.
“So my question is, what is going on?” he said.
Chief executive Abigail Harris said she had recently visited the emergency department and she had seen what had been described in the meeting.
She said the health board would work hard to try to create more space as a short-term measure, and a longer-term plan to redevelop the emergency department was being drawn up.
This latter scheme has been estimated to cost £20m to £30m, according to a separate estates report.
Ms Harris said measures such as more visible security could help. She spoke about “right-sizing” in terms of emergency department staff numbers.
She said: “We are having to juggle that we have got a significant financial deficit that we have to bring back under control, and the mechanism we have got is to ensure we don’t make our services unsafe.”
She added: “It’s about having staff who want to be permanent members of the team.”
Health board chairwoman Jan Williams said: “We give you our word that we will take action.”