Tea room, common room, staff room, break room, whatever you call it most hospital wards have one.
Or do they?
Increasingly, in our overcrowded hospitals every square centimeter of architectural real-estate has become precious. And anecdotally at least, the ward tea room has become one of the first areas to feel the squeeze.
They are often tiny spartan furnished rooms with a single overstuffed fridge, perhaps sitting beside an equally overstuffed noticeboard, some tea and coffee making facilities and some old tables and chairs.
On the other hand, our own department is lucky enough to have a large tea room with a long central table and couches. We have over 130 nurses working in our unit, so it is usually messy and scruffy and contains several secret biological catastrophes encapsulated within its fridges.
But this room is as important to us as CPR.
I believe some newer wards have lost their tea rooms completely. Hospital administrators preferring the staff to use a hospital cafeteria area, imagining it will lead to a greater community cohesion amongst their staff.
Staff who, for the most part, remain impervious to this strategy and sit crowded around the tables grouped by ward teams anyways.
Architects and hospital administrators take note. The importance of this little space cannot be underestimated.
It is sanctuary.
It is hearth.
It is the hub of staff interactions, where communication mixes policy and practice discussions with personal debriefs, gossip, gobs of freely spilled dark humour, and wild, unprofessional celebration.
Over time and in unnoticed increments, amongst the old magazines and unwashed dishes, the individual ward identity develops and matures.
Staff gather to mourn their own, to mark birthdays and acknowledge professional development in their colleagues. It is dance hall, confessional and fortress of solitude.
The ward tea room can be the crucible that melts a strong team solder. It is a space to collectively rope-up and re-supply before setting out to navigate the Khumbu Icefall that is our hospital life.
It is a space that should not be taken.
The provision food and beverages are now sub-contracted out to private operators. Many hospital foyers now are beginning to resemble mini shopping centers as hospital administrators lease out floor space.
By closing down the ward breakrooms, it covertly forces staff into temptation, 3 or 4 bucks for a coffee, plus a muffin and before you know morning tea is costing you almost 100 bucks a fortnight, of which about 20% goes back into the hospitals bank account, and other hidden investors.
The introduction of car parking fees, plus increase costs of food and beverages, milks thousands of dollars out of the pockets of staff every year.
The unit I’m rotating through at the moment as part of my training is fortunate to have two tea rooms. That said we pay for pretty much everything else. Tea bags and such come from mess funds to which all staff contribute somewhere in their pay. The reason we have two tea rooms is we’re a seventy bed unit and well, that equates to plenty of nurses and plenty of health care assistants on at any given time. However, in the NHS nursing staff are not exactly what you’d call valued as we once were. There is a swindle in parliament to cut pay across the country. A staff nurse earns aroun £20,000 pa and a nursing auxilliary earns around £13,500 a year. We are generally obliged to work long days from twelve to fourteen hours in length and are treated like crap by management. One of the big problems is that we have too many giving the orders and not enough to carry them out. They wonder why we can’t give the gold standard of care they so desire.
Having been a nurse for over 33 years, I have seen the staff lounge diminish in many various health care settings. My current place of employment allows mealtimes/break time in a common area where patients can mingle and even do their laundry. In my previous place of employment, we had a small room which house two bathrooms right next to a portable table furnished to eat on. There was no microwave or refrigerator in that room, but only lockers, a table, time clocks, and those two bathrooms. And, we weren’t even allowed to sit in the dining room to eat our meals.
What I interpret in this shift from available lounging areas, is that employers value and respect the employees less and less these days.
I find the hospital cafeteria invariably loud and crowded, dreary, inconveniently located and a generally tempestuous place to break. Communities are indeed forged there but they are far from hospital-wide, the table groups are like islands only traversed at great peril.
I like nothing more than sitting in my ward tea-room before my shift or on a break gossiping about the day, discussing with fervour the people of the 8-month-old New Idea on the table and occasionally eating.
If they take my tea room, they take my sanity.
Defence thought our Tea Room would be of more use as a room to keep the Compactus for Medical Documents..managed to fight to keep the Fridge and we have a dirty Old Bookcase we keep an Urn and the Microwave on…at least we have something !!!.So we stand around the Bookcase and have a chat…which opens out on to a corridor..But nowhere to sit and eat…..mmmmsoon we will be Having Portoloos in the Corridor’s !!!!
in a recent renovation of our e.d. we lost our tea room and it was relocated to a narrow corridor directly behind treatment beds. there’s very little space and no noise insulation, which unfortunately means any griping or venting is clearly heard by the patients, particularly the pt in bed 3 who’s head is one paper thin wall from joining us at the table!
No tea room for SAPU staff, just a tiny alcove with a partition, near the patient pantry so we have no privacy from patients/family!
I am flabbergasted that a hospital would even consider taking away the breakroom, particularly in somewhere as stressful as ED! It’s the only place to escape the constant noise and bustle, and often the only place where we get genuine inter-disciplinary bonding and get to know our colleagues. Also serves as a de-stress and debrief area when one of us becomes overwhelmed and needs a quiet place to have a cry…
Not a place I want to do without!
Mel (Ed Reg)
Hallelujah brother. It is crucial, this small and usually filthy little room. They can ( and have) taken away our teabags and coffee in an attempt to make us use their horrid cafeteria, but they will not defeat us.
The ward I work on at the moment has been upgraded in the last few years and doesn’t include a ward break room. The hospital break room does have partitioned off area that the ward nurses have claimed (small hospital, only one ward) which has some couches.
Still not quite the same though, many times I feel like my life has been saved by being horizontal for 20 minutes in the middle of a shift from hell! I don’t think that I could work somewhere without a couch…