The focus of the health service is now on finances rather than patient safety, the general secretary of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) said ahead of a series of lunchtime protests over staff shortages.
The current ceilings and caps on recruitment are very restrictive, Phil Ní Sheaghdha told RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland. “The process of recruitment has become increasingly more difficult.”
Trade unions – including the INMO, Fórsa and Siptu – that represent workers in the public health service will stage lunchtime protests on Thursday. These will take place at Cork University Hospital and the HSE headquarters in Dublin, in response to an ongoing dispute regarding staffing.
Ms Ní Sheaghdha pointed out that every report into the health service cited staffing levels as the main issue. “What we want is legislation to ensure that when we make agreements about safe staffing, they are measured on patient safety, that they’re implemented, but they’re not subject to annual cuts and delays in recruitment which are purposefully introduced. That is causing the service to be unsafe.”
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Directors of nursing had been “stripped of their authority to recruit where they see gaps and where they see need. And there is a focus now on the finances as opposed to patient safety. And that is what health care workers who work in the system are objecting to”.
There were more people applying for nursing posts than there were places available, she added.
Ms Ní Sheaghdha clarified that the moratorium on recruitment had not been lifted last July.
“In fact, what happened in July of this year was that the HSE decided that all posts that were not physically filled in December 2023 were gone. So it’s actually worse.
“We now have a situation where, by our figures, there were just over 2,000 vacancies in the nursing and midwifery professions and the system is now being told that they can’t fill those because they don’t exist. That’s because in July, by the stroke of a pen, it was decided that they were gone,” she said.
“They are necessary. They are required for patients who attend our hospitals. I was at a meeting last night, a community meeting, where people said it is just incredible when they go and attend the public health service – they can see the shortage. It’s visible, but obviously the HSE are announcing that the finances are overstretched. Therefore, we are not going to provide sufficient staff to provide safe care.
“Everybody who works in the system and the reason they’re protesting today [and] will continue those protests next week is because they want to work in a safe system,” Ms Ní Sheaghdha said.
The INMO and Fórsa are among a wider group of unions to have been critical of the limits on recruitment and overall staffing levels set out in HSE’s Pay and Numbers Strategy (PNS) which was published at the start of the summer.
The unions argue the arbitrary nature of the limits mean thousands of jobs that existed but were temporarily vacant at the end of last year were effectively suppressed when the PNS figures were put in place.
The HSE contends it had to put budgets and staffing ceilings in place, and that the numbers involved represent very substantial increases on the numbers of workers employed within the health service as recently as the start of the pandemic in 2020.
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