Safe levels of patient care in hospitals and other healthcare settings across the State are being compromised by the moratorium on recruitment in the public sector, the general secretary of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation has claimed.
Speaking at the opening of the union's annual conference in Kilkenny today, Liam Doran called for the introduction of legislation which would guarantee safe nurse to patient ratios.
Two nurses based in the west said it is now not uncommon to have one nurse and one attendant looking after 30 patients in HSE run elderly care facilities at night time or to have just two nurses and one attendant looking after 28 acute medical patients in a general hospital.
Mr Doran said patient care was also being compromised by bed closures and continuing overcrowding in hospital emergency departments.
He said there were now 1,776 beds closed across the country and the number of patients on trolleys in emergency departments in the first three months of this year was 16 per cent higher than over the same period last year and 52 per cent higher than in 2006, when former minister for health Mary Harney declared the problem a national emergency.
Furthermore he said the health service had lost 4,100 staff in the last year. Some 967 of these were nurses who were lost under the moratorium.
"Someone is going to have to answer the question, when is this going to stop? When are we going to amend the embargo so that frontline posts are protected? We cannot continue to lose 1,000 nurses a year. We cannot continue to close beds and we cannot continue to suffer this level of A&E overcrowding," he said.
"That is why we are calling for the introduction of legislation which would guarantee nurse and midwife patient ratios relevant to the acuity of the patients, the needs of the patients and so on, and those ratios to be determined by the nurse in charge of the ward or the midwife in charge of the ward ... there are models of that in Australia, there are models of that in America, there are other models in Canada to a lesser extent," he added.
The INMO is also hoping the new Government will look at implementing a recommendation that was contained in the report from the commission set up in 2007 to look at reducing nurses' hours.
It recommended a two-year internship programme be offered to graduating nurses, allowing them gain experience on a smaller salary. Mr Doran said it would be an ideal part of the Government's jobs initiative to be announced next week, but pointed out that the salaries of nurses had already been reduced so these new graduates – around 1,600 of them a year - could be placed in the system on salaries of around €26,000.
Minister for Health James Reilly will address delegates on Friday when he will be asked to make commitments around the placement of graduate nurses who would otherwise have to emigrate and to give a commitment not to cut the pay of student nurses.