Council backs call for more hospital staff

KERRY County Council this week backed a motion by Fine Gael Councillor Seamus Cosaí Fitzgerald calling on the HSE to get on with the job of hiring more staff for West Kerry Community Hospital in Dingle so that idle beds can be brought back into use.

The motion proposed by Cllr Fitzgerald at a meeting of the Council on Monday comes amid an ongoing staffing crisis that has forced the piecemeal closure of beds at the hospital over the past year.

Following the Council meeting, Cllr Fitzgerald told The Kerryman that he understands the hospital can currently provide only 37 beds because of staff shortages. The hospital has a capacity of 54 beds but these have never been fully utilised since the hospital opened in 2010.

In August The Kerryman reported that four short-stay beds had been closed at the hospital, bringing the total number of beds in use down from 46 to 42. At that time, the HSE described the bed closures as ‘temporary’, adding that: We are working to make sure that this temporary closure ends as soon as possible.”

The HSE was unwilling to say the bed closures in August were directly related to staff shortages but did acknowledge that, “West Kerry Community Hospital has faced recruitment challenges in recent years”.

Those ‘recruitment challenges’ have been apparent ever since the HSE reached an agreement with the health watchdog HIQA in September 2016 to bring the hospital up to its full operating capacity of 54 beds. The agreement with HIQA was followed by a demand from the INMO nurses’ union that more nursing staff would have to be recruited before bed capacity could be increased. Following lengthy negotiations with unions, the HSE finally reached an agreement in February of 2017 on staffing levels and launched a recruitment campaign soon afterwards. However, that campaign has been notable for its failure to increase staff numbers.

Cllr Fitzgerald said this week that he believes the HSE has been too narrowly focused on hiring nurses. “Do they need [to employ only] nurses? Surely health care assistants [HCA] could be employed to alleviate the staffing situation but I’m told that there’s a moratorium on hiring HCAs,” he said.

“At this stage I’m tired of the carry on. If health care assistants are available why not hire them? You have to think of elderly people who are being forced out of the peninsula to find beds,” he said.

On two occasions this summer the HSE told The Kerryman that the number of beds in use in Dingle hospital is sufficient to meet the local demand. Cllr Fitzgerald doesn’t believe this.

“I’m not buying any claim by the HSE that there’s no demand for beds; and on top of that we have a situation where patients are clogging up beds in University Hospital Kerry when they could be moved back to Dingle Hospital if beds were available here,” he said.

He added that he was aware of a situation where one elderly patient had been sent home because of a bed closure and the family of a second patient who is over 90 years of age had been advised to seek a bed in a nursing home or some other hospital.