Nurses at the Grafton Base Hospital, in northern New South Wales, should know later today if their campaign for extra staff has been successful.A reasonable workload submission was lodged with the North Coast Area Health Service.It came after the nursing union found the number of complex-care patients treated in the emergency department jumped by about 40 per cent in a year.Area health chief executive officer Chris Crawford says a meeting today will decide if an extra nurse is needed for each shift.He says figures from similar hospitals will be used to determine the merits of the case.“That consideration involves us benchmarking the number of nurses working in the Grafton Base Hospital emergency department and the number of patients being treated against other similar hospitals to see if Grafton base has more or less nurses for the number of patients it treats,” he said. Read more