Long catch-up after nurse strike

Hospital waiting lists, already strained before the nurse strike, have now expanded to unprecedented levels.

Only urgent surgical operations were carried out during the six-week strike, which ended a month ago.

This meant that 325 surgical operations and about 3,000 outpatient appointments were cancelled or postponed.

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“The waiting lists for operations were long even before the nurse strike. Now they are much longer, and it will probably take all of next year to clear the backlog,” says Steinar Eirikstoft, who heads the hospital system.

The only viable way to speed up this process is to add more evening and night shifts, and that requires significant extra funding from the government. But this is not an ideal solution either, he says.

“Asking all our staff to work overtime would result in burnout for many. So we need to find innovative solutions to increase efficiency and productivity, allowing us to meet our goals without overworking our team.”

Read the Faroese version of this article here.

More Faroese News in English.