MINISTER FOR Health James Reilly openly clashed with a top official in the Department of Health and with the Health Service Executive yesterday.
He said that figures for numbers of patients on trolleys in hospital emergency departments being issued by the HSE did not reflect reality and that a letter issued by the department official did not reflect his views.
Mr Reilly told delegates attending the final day of the annual conference of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation in Kilkenny that the daily trolley figures released by the nurses’ union were more accurate than those of the HSE and these were the ones which would be used in future.
He also said a letter sent by the secretary general of the Department of Health, Michael Scanlan, to the INMO on Thursday in relation to a review of proposals to cut the pay of fourth-year student nurses did not reflect his views. The letter circulated to delegates at the conference said the review would use terms of reference outlined by the previous government and would “not encompass the arrangements already introduced for student nurses undertaking a rostered placement in 2011”.
Angry delegates said they would not co-operate with the type of review outlined in the letter. Dr Reilly assured them “everything would be on the table” for review and Aisling Maher, a student nurse at TCD, said when she confronted Dr Reilly afterwards he indicated he didn’t expect student nurses to work for nothing. The previous government announced in December it planned to phase out payments to student nurses from 2015 and it reduced the pay of this year’s fourth-year students to 76 per cent of the salary of a starting nurse, down from 80 per cent of a staff nurse’s salary. For some this was followed by a further 10 per cent cut in line with the cut for all new entrants to the public service in January.
Dr Reilly, when questioned on how he was now saying something different to what a senior official in his department said a day earlier, stated: “Well the facts speak for themselves. That’s what my position is. That’s what the department’s position is. The letter is a letter, I could go into the details as to how it might have emanated from the department but that’s neither here nor there”.
He added: “I’m very happy to make it very clear that everything is on the table.”
Earlier he explained he wanted to move on from “fighting about what constitutes somebody lying on a trolley or what the numbers [on trolleys] are” and to “focus on fixing the problem”. He wanted to move to a point where a patient arriving in an emergency department would be admitted to a bed on a ward or be discharged within six hours.
He said in opposition he had accepted the INMO’s daily trolley count and had, since taking office, “drilled down and examined the figures of both the HSE and the INMO and the nurses’ figures are closer to the reality”.
In response to INMO demands that graduating nurses be offered two years’ work in hospitals to consolidate their skills, he said his department was looking at this and it was “something we would like to look at in a very positive light”. Earlier Sheila Dickson, president of the INMO, told Dr Reilly overcrowding in emergency departments continued to grow and this had to be addressed by opening closed beds and tackling the work practices of hospital consultants. She also said the recruitment embargo was “unsafe, unsustainable and must be lifted ”.