Hospitals plan to build or buy housing for staff in bid to retain nurses

Hospitals are drawing up plans to build or buy houses for nurses and other key staff, according to the Minister for Health, who says funding could be made available from the capital health budget

Stephen Donnelly suggested it would be for the HSE and hospitals to take the lead on finding a solution to accommodation shortages but he was open to the idea of money being made available to house staff.

Speaking at the annual conference of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation in Killarney on Friday, he said management at a number of the country’s major hospitals have spoken to him about how they could address the accommodation problem seen as a major barrier to recruitment and retention of key staff.

He said he spoke to management at the Mater hospital in Dublin last week about housing solutions, while he has also been in contact with other hospitals, including Galway University Hospital, about the issue.

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“Individual hospitals are now looking at this. I think that’s very positive because I think, in the cases of the hospitals that are having the most difficulty in hiring people, it is because of the lack of rental accommodation. They’re the ones that really are looking to prioritise this,” he said.

“The proposals are coming to me actually from hospital managers [and] we’ll continue to have those conversations with the Department, with the HSE and with the estates team in the HSE to see where we might be able to invest to start creating some of this accommodation.”

Mr Donnelly said the Mater was looking at properties in Dublin close to the hospital that it could “retrofit to make them appropriate for accommodation or, indeed, start to build their own individual blocks.”

He said he could see no reason why funding might not be provided from the capital budget for next year, although “it would be up to the HSE and the hospitals to put together bids for this kind of accommodation but, certainly, that can be that can be looked at as part of the normal estimates process yet.”

Asked about the provision of housing during his visit to the conference on Thursday, new HSE chief executive Bernard Gloster said he did not “want to stray into a space that is not ours” but suggested that the problem applied equally to gardaí and teachers and was, therefore, “a public sector wide issue”.

He said he did not envisage a return to nursing students being “accommodated on the hospital campus in the nurses home.

“Life has moved on in every international healthcare setting from that time. I certainly don’t see us going back into that space,” he said.

Sinn Féin health spokesman David Cullinane said providing modern accommodation would be welcome but the priority should be on Government delivering targets on affordable houses “which would benefit everybody”.

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Any funding for the construction of accommodation by the HSE or hospitals needed to be via additional funding and not take away from other spending on healthcare infrastructure, said Mr Cullinane.

“But, if they are serious about this, then they need to look at sites that they already own and where this could be made to happen relatively quickly. They need to seek expressions of interest from hospitals to find out whether they have land they could build on and whether, if the money was made available, they could do it,” he said.

He said he and other party representatives had recently met officials from Children’s Health Ireland and that the possibility of using the Crumlin Hospital site for HSE staff accommodation when services are moved from it to the new national children’s hospital (NCH) had been one of the issues raised.

Addressing the union’s delegates on Friday, INMO president, Karen McGowan, said the provision of assistance with housing should be a prerequisite when new hospitals are being planned.

The Government, Department or HSE should “not be contemplating opening more beds without a plan to house those who will staff them,” she said.

The union has previously said that the new NCH in Dublin will not be able to become fully operational unless help is provided with regard to accommodation as it will not able to recruit the staff that it needs.

As Mr Donnelly spoke to reporters at the conference on Friday, delegates were unanimously supporting a motion that called for the provision of both accommodation and creche facilities by hospitals with speakers describing a situation in which nurses were having to make long commutes to work as unsafe.