Nurses and midwives at the Canberra Hospital are working extra shifts and overtime amid reports the hospital is struggling to fill 100 vacancies.

The government says the positions represent a five percent vacancy rate of the hospital’s 2000 nursing staff but the nurses union states the shortage is taking its toll on staff.

Australian Nursing Federation ACT branch secretary Jenny Miragaya said nurses were becoming “burnt out and fatigued”.

“Nurses and midwives usually put their patients first, often to the detriment of the nurse…going without proper meal and rest breaks, work(ing) extra shifts and overtime,” she said.

“Without sufficient numbers of appropriately skilled nurses and midwives to meet workload demand, staff are placed in an unsafe work environment and patients may be placed in an unsafe clinical environment.

“It is not sustainable to rely on the goodwill of nurses to continue to work extra shifts and overtime to meet the ordinary demands of the system,” she said.

“These are the strategies employed to meet extraordinary demands.”

Ms Miragaya said there have also been reports of role substitution where Assistants in Nursing are being used to replace registered and enrolled nurses.

“In the acute care sector, AINs are able to provide assistance with personal care needs, they are not able to undertake the duties of registered nurses,” she said.

“Sufficient skilled staffing needs to be provided to meet the workload. So either more nurses need to be employed or the workload needs to be contained.