Irish people live in a First-World country but have a Third-World health service, the president of the Irish Nurses' Organisation said yesterday as she rallied the organisation's 28,000 members to shout stop to further cuts in health services.
Ms Clare Spillane said no amount of public relations or spin would alter the fact that the current cutbacks, including bed closures, would hurt the old, sick and most vulnerable.
Public beds were closing while some hospitals were expanding their VHI beds to generate income, she added, describing this as unfair and inequitable.
She also criticised as unacceptable the "ongoing intergovernmental disputes" between the Minister for Health, Mr Martin, and Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, over the funding of the health service.
Addressing the final day of the INO's annual conference in Galway, she called for radical reform of the health service, pointing out that there had been "an irrational growth" in management positions in the sector in recent years. "The Department of Health's own figures confirm that between 1997 and 2001 there was a 50 per cent growth in management posts with only a 9 per cent increase in nursing posts," she said.
"Many senior lay managers state that they are involved in strategic management and that day-to-day operational issues are of no concern to them. We have more senior managers who can tell us how many over-75-year-olds, living alone, we will have in 2015.
"Then we have senior managers who would be prepared to solve the disgrace of patients on trolleys in A&E departments all over the country. This cannot be the right way to manage a modern health service. The current approach of senior lay management is flawed and everyone is suffering because of their air of untouchability," she added.
Any reform package, she said, would have to include the introduction of a new grade of hospital consultant who would be dedicated to public patients and work longer hours.
There were also too many health boards, she said.
On pay and working conditions for nurses, Ms Spillane said the INO would never agree again to another benchmarking exercise.
And she warned that nurses would take industrial action unless their claim for a 35-hour working week was met.
The issue comes before the Labour Court on May 20th. She said nurses worked a minimum of four hours per week longer than all other officer grades in the health service and "industrial relations stability" couldn't be sustained if "this stark and grossly unfair anomaly" was allowed continue.
Furthermore, she said pay was the key factor in retaining staff in the health sector. The State was now wholly reliant upon overseas nurses to staff the health services, with up to 25 per cent of staff nurses in some instances coming from outside the State.
Yet, she said, many of the large hospitals could not guarantee work for student nurses who qualified next September.
"What kind of a health service spends millions on recruiting nurses from around the world while being unable to provide work for its own newly qualified staff? This is madness," she said.