Nurses denied leave, patients at risk Australian Nurses Federation state secretary Mark Olsen. PATIENTS' lives are being put "at risk" because nurses are driven to exhaustion after being denied holidays. Australian Nursing Federation state secretary Mark Olson said overworked nurses were pushed "beyond their normal limits" by the lack of leave, which was often caused by staff shortages and cutbacks. He said some nurses were having leave refused even when asking up to 18 months in advance. "The potential for mistakes to occur, which put patients' lives at risk, is far greater when the WA Government creates a fatigued, burnt-out workforce, which is happening now, because nurses are being denied leave," Mr Olson said. Government records show nurses were owed about 2.85 million hours of annual leave, and a further 1.85 million hours of long-service leave, in May. Annual leave owed had increased by about 327,000 hours and long service by 338,000 hours since December 2011. A WA Health Department spokesman confirmed "there is a significant total of leave owing," but the WA Health Minister's office refused to comment. Mr Olson said he had received hundreds of emails about the lack of leave, and it was becoming "one of the key issues facing our hospital system." He said some nurses and midwives were told they could not take leave because "there are too many staff on maternity leave, or there are staff away on long-service leave." Mr Olson said this was particularly worrying because "more younger nurses than ever were having babies" and WA also had a rapidly ageing nursing workforce that had accrued "record levels of long-service leave." "The result is that if there are one or two nurses who are away on maternity leave or long- service leave on any particular ward, that means annual leave is denied to the other 20 or 30 staff in that same area," he said. Without time to rest and without time to step away from work and spend some time with your loved ones, we are seeing the net effect of these policies leading to resignations and sick leave due to exhaustion. The department spokesman said: "It is not WA Health policy to deny access to leave. WA Health recognises there is a significant total of leave owing and has strategies in place to limit the department's total leave liability to the level which applied at June last year, as all government departments are required to do. Options are available for staff with significant leave accrued. But he would not say what the strategies or options were, or provide a dollar value of the leave owing. Opposition health spokesman Roger Cook said the leave would be worth "many millions of dollars," which represents "a significant liability to the Health Department." "Does the cash-strapped Health Department have the resources to cover this, or are we looking at another Government budget black hole in a week that the Barnett Government's economic mismanagement lost WA its AAA credit rating?" he said.