A chara, – In “Hard decisions loom when slicing up a very large pie” (Opinion & Analysis, May 6th), Pat Leahy sought to belittle the arguments made by working nurses and midwives that it has never been so hard to work in the Irish health system.
Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) members have been arguing that staffing levels are unsafe since 2008. When staffing is unsafe it affects patient care: we don’t make this up for headlines, it is not exaggeration, and our delegates at successive conferences describe what they witness patients enduring.
The moratorium on recruitment in the health services at that time cut just over 3,500 whole-time equivalent nursing and midwifery posts from the public service and slowed down recruitment to these essential frontline posts for the following decade.
It was not until the second half of 2020 that we regained the staffing numbers that we had in December 2007. During this period our services expanded, and our population has grown – hence the increasing waiting lists and record numbers on trolleys
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Then we had a pandemic.
Services that did not exist before January 2020 now do. This is a good thing; we have found new ways of delivering services to patients that are not all hospital-based. We have many new and innovative nurse and midwife-led services, delivering care to the population in their own communities. New services need new staff.
New community and acute services coupled with the hangover from the recruitment embargo required the recruitment of these additional nursing posts in the past four years. However, the 6,000 additional posts quoted by the Department of Health is an uplift since December 2019 and includes 1,102 student nurses and midwives in training, not yet qualified but counted as part of the workforce figures.
The Department of Health have acknowledged that the OECD figures for nursing are not correct.
That is why they have now notified the OECD that the future measurement of nursing data in Ireland will no longer be based on the CSO Quarterly Household Survey results, where it is up to the respondent to describe their occupation, but on the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland’s registration statistics, which differentiate between practising bedside nurses and those that are qualified but not practising at the bedside which is inflating the current OECD figures.
According to the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland, there are 47,882 general nurses in patient-facing roles, not 85,000, as the article would suggest.
Why is it when a trade union that is made up of 92 per cent women who work in the caring profession detail the very real working experience of their members it is painted as hyperbole? Don’t just take our word for it, other organisations representing the health workforce regularly paint the exact same picture.
The Health and Information Quality Authority have found that not one hospital they have inspected in the last 12 months has been fully compliant when it comes to staffing, regularly calling conditions for patients and staff “inhumane”.
We will continue to call out the incredibly difficult circumstances our members are working in and will make no apologies for it. – Is mise,
PHIL NÍ SHEAGHDHA,
General Secretary,
Irish Nurses
and Midwives Organisation,
Dublin 7.