An extra 1,000 beds in the Irish health sector and immediate initiatives to address nurse shortages are among the demands of the Irish Nurses Organisation in its pre-Budget submission published yesterday.
The union said half the extra beds should be provided in acute hospitals and the other half in the non-acute sector such as nursing homes. These would help ease the ongoing crisis in hospital accident and emergency departments, it believes.
There are at present just under 12,000 acute beds and over 18,000 non-acute beds in the system.
Calling for an increase in funding for the health service to a level of 10 per cent of GDP, the INO said: "There must be no repeat of this year's debacle which saw patients on trolleys on a daily basis in most A&E departments" and others left in acute hospitals when they could have been cared for in other non-acute settings if subvention funding was available.
The INO said the Government should borrow to allow continued investment in the health service, as well as in education and transport.
Furthermore it called again for specific measures to assist in the recruitment and retention of nurses and midwives. There are up to 1,000 nursing vacancies across the country and the INO believes more nurses would stay in the profession if they had a 35-hour working week. It also calls in its submission for a special payment for nurses and midwives working in particularly difficult areas, a Dublin living allowance for those in hospitals in the capital, and paid six month sabbaticals for nurses after five years of service.
It also urged the Government to grant the spouses of non-national nurses an automatic entitlement to work here. The State, it said, was losing large numbers of Filipino nurses because their spouses were not automatically given work permits.
In addition, the Budget must demonstrate through the allocation of sufficient resources, that the Government remains committed to the full implementation of the National Health Strategy and its health service reform programme, it said. On broader issues the union called for child benefit and the old age pension to be increased and for workers on the minimum wage to be removed from the tax net.