‘Everyone wants to move to the HSE’
WHILE private sector work may be more lucrative for many health professionals, it is the opposite for frontline workers in nursing homes – where staff are expected to look after a far higher number of patients.
Varghese Joy, an elderly care nurse originally from Kerala in India, is employed by the HSE at Cherry Orchard Hospital in Dublin. He said: ‘The majority of the nurses and a lot of carers in my workplace are migrant workers.
‘That’s just generally the trend in nursing homes, whether it’s HSE or private. I worked in St Mary’s in Phoenix Park and the majority of the nurses there are migrants.’
Mr Joy, who has lived in Ireland for almost 17 years, said the private nursing home sector in particular is ‘largely driven by migrant nurses’ – though ‘almost everyone’ there wants to move to the HSE.
‘They differ, but in general the staffing ratio is very low in private nursing homes,’ he said. I have heard about places where 30 or 40 residents are managed by one nurse.
‘In the HSE, if you have 40 residents, you will have around three or four nurses and a couple of care assistants. There are at least three nurses at night, but in private nursing homes it could be managed by one nurse without care assistants.’
Pay in the private sector is also ‘very minimal’, he said, with no premiums for working Sundays or bank holidays. And workers can be locked into their jobs thanks to the conditions of a Critical Skills Employment Permit, which many non-EU migrants avail of.
‘Initially, they were only allowed to change their job after two years. That was a huge leverage for some employers to treat them differently, because they know that these people can only change their work permit after two years, so employees will stay with them.
‘The Government changed that to nine months, but in an ideal world, anyone should be able to change their employer at any time they want, even after three or four months.’