Sir, – Prof Seamus Cowman's contention that the HSE's efforts to recruit and retain nurses have failed is absolutely correct ("HSE initiatives to recruit nurses to the Irish health service have failed", Opinion & Analysis, August 27th). Its recruitment campaign has indeed been piecemeal and half-hearted. Its clear and shameful message to newly qualified graduates, after four years of university study and holding honours degrees, has been that there are no jobs available, the implication being that the only option is emigration. Of course, as every clinical nurse knows, the nurse/patient ratio has been and still is dangerously high, and I use the term "dangerously" advisedly, in view of the high risk of mistakes being made, with potential fatal consequences.
As Dr Cowman also reminds us, once those highly qualified nurses settle into such places as Australia, Canada, the US, the Middle East and the UK, they are very unlikely to return home, especially when they can command much higher salaries and better working conditions, in addition to easier access to postgraduate training and professional development.
Meanwhile, our hospital wards and departments – public and private – are increasingly staffed by overseas nurses.
The HSE logic is quite baffling!
It also has to be said that nurses themselves also need to be a lot more proactive in regard to professional development; merely reacting to conditions is not good enough. The unions only become publicly vocal in relation to salaries and staffing.
We need the strong, convincing voices of nurses, especially clinical practitioners, plus the university academics, to outline the empirical evidence, to address the issues which clinical nurses and unions complain of and which are often cited by nurses as reasons for emigration. Such voices must be robust enough to convince policymakers and managers of the essential rationale required to address the deficits and thus boost the morale and professional integrity of the profession and, fundamentally, standards of excellence in clinical nursing practise. – Yours, etc,
PATRICK J O’BRIEN,
(Lecturer Emeritus
in Nursing,
Trinity College Dublin),
Maynooth,
Co Kildare.