Nurses demand repeal of policy allowing staff to work before finishing self-isolating period

Nurses and midwives have demanded a repeal of a controversial derogation policy in the health service which they say can result in potentially Covid-positive healthcare staff going back to work before completing their self-isolation period.

Delegates attending the annual conference of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO), held virtually on Friday, also demanded that a major staffing boost be put in place urgently to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic.

The conference passed an emergency motion which also sought mandatory Covid-19 testing for all staff in acute and community healthcare services.

The motion called on the INMO’s executive council to revert to members in six weeks’ time to see if sufficient progress had been made on these issues.

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The union said that since December 2019, approximately only 240 additional staff nurses and midwives had been recruited.

“The HSE has claimed that 1,600 additional nurses have been hired since May. The INMO has highlighted that 1,300 of these are not qualified nurses, but are in fact students who have been temporarily hired”, it said.

INMO general secretary, Phil Ní Sheaghdha, said: “The message from our members is clear. Frontline nurses and midwives simply do not have enough staff to do the job safely.”

“Our members are facing risky Covid-19 environments with high levels of fatigue. This will only intensify as winter approaches. If we want to provide safe care and protect staff, we simply need to increase staffing. Our unpaid student nurses are being relied on to fill vacancies and this not acceptable.”

“That means giving managers the powers to hire, ending the derogations policy which risks infecting more staff, increasing staff testing, and funding a proper staffing plan.”

The HSE told the Oireachtas committee on Covid-19 in July that "at the very beginning of the pandemic it was evident that there was a requirement for close contacts to be derogated back to work if they were deemed essential for services under twice daily active monitoring".

The HSE said at the time that as such derogations were issued locally and were a line management responsibility there was” currently no central oversight of the overall number of staff who were derogated”.