Breast cancer patient Bridie wakes up after a mastectomy to find herself on a trolley in a corridor, her belongings on the floor beside her. "The trauma of it," she recalls emotionally later that day to staff nurse Mary Kelly once she's finally lying in a private room. Discovering she had breast cancer, and the subsequent treatments, were difficult enough without also being faced with the inadequacies of the Irish healthcare system.
This is not an isolated incident. In the accident and emergency (A&E) department, there are still 19 of last night's people sleeping in the corridor and nowhere for the new patients to be treated, so the backlog gets longer. It's a typical day on the frontline, as seen in RT╔'s new fly-on-the-wall documentary series, Nurses, filmed in University College Hospital, Galway (UCHG) late last year.
That the State's healthcare system is in crisis is not news, and nurses are the individuals who must face up to the demands it makes. Underpaid, overworked and struggling to maintain the highest level of care, they are the human face of an ailing health system.
The profession has undergone huge changes in Ireland in recent years - from a caring vocation to one of crisis management. Given the healthcare crisis and the poor salaries on offer, Nurses looks at what motivates and keeps nurses doing their job.
The series is graphic, gritty and gory, with more blood and guts - and more human interest - than is found in television hospital dramas. Power Pictures, the independent production company which made it, followed the lives of seven nurses working in UCHG over a three-month period to explore the reality of nursing today, rather than looking at the system itself or industrial relations.
The working conditions, bed shortages, patient waiting-lists and resource shortages are a backdrop to the human interest focus. The seven nurses are drawn from across the hospital and include a student nurse and a ward sister with more than 30 years' experience.
The series features student nurse Jenie Moran, A&E nurse Eoin McGinn, ward sister Joanna Downes, staff nurse Mary Kelly, breast care specialist nurse Mary Grealish, paediatric nurse Margaret Duignan and midwives Noreen Coen and Mary Jordan. Twelve-hour shifts, trudges across a car-park turned into a building site (as the hospital undergoes a £70 million redevelopment programme) to get to the staff canteen, pillows borrowed from neighbouring wards, patients dying under care, and struggles to find beds for new patients - it's all in a day's work.
"The nurse/patient relationship is the linchpin of the hospital system," says David Power of Power Pictures. "Whether it's dealing with the long-term cancer patients, the expectant mother wishing to give birth at home or the crash victim being rushed through casualty doors, the nurse is always in the front line. They're the ones who must keep the best side out, whatever the circumstances. We wanted to show what it was to be a nurse today, what motivates them and what keeps them there in light of their salaries. It's a tough job, both physically and mentally," he said.
A&E is where the action takes place. There are patients who have had accidents with chainsaws, pools of blood on the floor, car crash victims, a thumb wrapped in a packet of frozen peas and young children requiring stitches - all to a continuous soundtrack of crying babies, shrieking phones and shouting voices. A&E nurse Eoin McGinn manages to keep a smile on his face throughout. Regularly working 12- or 13-hour shifts, McGinn deals with all levels of distress in casualty. He describes his job as "unpredictable, messy, lonely, long and tiring - but rewarding".
After a long period of research to find the right candidates for the series, two camera crews then followed the nurses daily for three months. Over time, trust developed and the nurses opened up to the cameras. "It was all very real. There were no rehearsals, the cameras had to catch it as it happened, on the hoof for three months - day shifts, night shifts. They even went home with the nurses to film them there," said Dave Power.
The series captures both the urgency of the A&E department and the intimacy of the breast cancer unit. The breast cancer unit footage is the most emotional, with cancer patients speaking openly to nurse Mary Grealish and agreeing to have treatments filmed. Mary Byrne has just had a mastectomy and is being fitted for a wig before she starts chemotherapy. She sobs when she learns of the side-effects of chemo, and the camera follows her to her first session, where she's in a more upbeat mood. Another breast cancer patient is being fitted for a prosthesis and the camera is allowed to stay.
One mother-to-be tells of how she'd like to freeze the placenta after giving birth, to eat at a later date as an antidote to post-natal depression, apparently common practice in Japan.
"The patients were the real heroes," acknowledges Power. "The relationship with patients came from nurses and without their co-operation we would only have heard about what goes on instead of showing it. We followed some individual patients over the three months. They were happy to have the camera there because they wanted their stories told. That took tremendous courage. There were no preconditions, no hidden agendas. We were given full access to the hospital with the agreement of all the relevant bodies, so this was a human interest story of the nurse."
Despite the pummelling that nursing as a profession has suffered, the enthusiasm and compassion of the nurses remain, though their contribution is still undervalued by what is described in the documentary, by ward sister Joanna Downes, as their "abysmal" salaries.
The late 1990s saw the majority of the 30,000 nurses employed in Ireland's public healthcare system on the picket lines demanding better salaries and promotional opportunities. The nurses strikes of 1997 and 1999 mobilised public support and changes did follow. Salaries now go some way to reflect the hard work of nurses, but, according to David Hughes, industrial relations officer with the Irish Nursing Organisation, those changes came too late. "Nurses left the country and the profession in droves, and now there's such a shortage of nurses that were looking to import them from other countries," he says.
When, in the third programme of the series, student nurse Jenie brings the camera into the house she shares with six fellow students, she says that, after paying rent, she has only £130 left of her monthly training wage. Ward sister Joanna Downes says that, with more than 30 years of managerial experience, she is still earning "around the £28,000 mark, and that's before tax". Earlier, she explains the basics of care to two student nurses: "Always treat the patient as though it was your mum, dad, sister or brother. Treat them with dignity and kindness."
Student nurse Jenie offers her reasons for nursing. "It's my dream occupation. This is what I've wanted to do all my life. It's so rewarding," she says. The na∩ve gushings of a novice still untainted by the harsh realities of the working world or the genuine vocational beliefs of one belonging to the profession?
Nurses begins on Tuesday on RT╔1 at 9.30 p.m.