NHS CHIEFS OFFER ‘MEGA MONEY’ TO HIRE OUR NURSES
British health service offers Irish graduates higher salary, €1,000 ‘hello money’, free flights home, meals, parking AND free further education
BADLY needed Irish nurses are being offered dazzling pay-and-perks packages to work for the NHS.
The recruitment drive may thwart Leo Varadkar’s push to sort out the crisis-prone HSE by finally hiring extra nurses.
It comes as the Health Minister plans to launch a campaign next month to try to bring our emigrant nurses home from Britain, where they are being given starting salaries up to €33,000 – almost €5,000 more than they would get here.
Recruitment agencies in the UK are also offering them perks such as €1,000 to cover the cost of relocating, free flights home to visit their loved ones throughout the year and fully funded
continuing education. They will also have accommodation arranged for when they arrive, free on-site parking, meals while on duty and free life assurance.
The jobs are in general, mental health and intellectual disability nursing, and they are being made available in Britain at a time when the public sector recruitment embargo has been lifted here and hundreds of nurses are being sought for Irish hospitals and community services.
Mr Varadkar announced his own r ecruitment drive l ast week. Although it will begin in Britain next month, in a bid to try to get Irish nurses to return home to work in the health service here, the finer details of the package have yet to be announced.
However, he may need to improve pay conditions here, where the salary for newly qualified nurses is about €27,211 – between €2,000 and €5,000 less than in Britain, where it is between €29,000 to €33,000.
Meanwhile, nurses in our beleaguered health services will be battling for pre-2009 pay and working hours to be restored when pay talks begin tomorrow.
The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation has told how its members will need to be ‘ incentivised’ with offers similar to those available in Britain if they are to return home to work here.
Thousands of Irish graduates were forced to go abroad to work in recent years as the public sector ban on recruitment took hold.
Figures obtained by the Irish Daily Mail show the lifting of the embargo has done little to stop the flow of graduates abroad.
In the first four months of the year, 374 nurses and midwives applied for papers to the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland to allow them to work abroad.
INMO president Claire Mahon said: ‘There is a difficulty recruiting and retaining our midwives to work within the Irish health system.
‘We are [in] a global economy and at this time other countries are placing more value on Irish nurses and midwives than we are.
‘We need to attract our graduates back to Ireland, and one of the ways to do this is to restore pay and working conditions.’
INMO general secretary Liam Doran said staffing levels dominated the lives, rosters and daily working hours of nurses.
He said: ‘ The l ast number of months has seen a change. We are now recruiting nurses and that has got to be welcomed.’
Mr Doran said the Irish health service recruitment drive abroad must ‘ensure that the environment nurses are coming back to is better than the one we are asking [them] to leave’. He said: ‘Of course that is about pay. We need to address that. It’s also about the work environment, the workloads, the hours. For instance, they have a 37-hour week in the UK.
‘It’s also about access to continuing professional development, which i sn’t done on the back of the individual as they strive to go forward but it is done in partnership with the employer.’
And the Health Minister has admitted a lot of our nurses have left for overseas positions that ‘are better paid plus health services that are easier to work in than ours’.
Mr Varadkar said: ‘What I would like is a number of initiatives over the next year or so, first of all to retain as much of the graduate class of nurses this year as we possibly can.
‘And secondly [I’d like] a dedicated programme in four cities in the United Kingdom to encourage nurses who are there to come back to Ireland to build their lives and careers here and to help us rebuild our health services.’
In the wake of the Portlaoise Hospital maternity scandal, nurses are calling for an additional 600 midwives to be recruited.
Mr Varadkar said: ‘It’s definitely the case we do need to improve our staffing levels in midwifery and also consultants and obstetricians.
‘If I tried to hire 600 midwives
‘Not just about staffing levels’
tomorrow I actually wouldn’t be able to do it. There are actually not many on the live register.
‘But what we will need is a workforce plan over the next number of years to bring specialist staffing levels up to standard.
‘We also need to always bear in mind that everything in the health service isn’t just about resourcing and staffing levels.
‘You need standards, you need quality, you need good teamwork and you need people living up to their professional responsibilities too. If they don’t do that it doesn’t matter how many staff or resources you have.’
Minister Varadkar has also promised that a new initiative to retain graduate nurses here will be announced soon.
And i t was revealed that the recruitment campaign to try to get our nurses back from the UK will begin in four cities next month.
About 1,000 nursing jobs are on offer in Ireland this year.
The first phase of the HSE recruitment drive, held earlier this year, focused on India, Australia and the Philippines.
The HSE spent between €1,000 and €3,000 for each nurse it hired in the first phase of a campaign to recruit nurses from abroad.
While the incentives on offer in the new phase as the recruitment drive hits the UK have yet to be confirmed, they may not match the perks on offer by agencies such as HealthcareElite, seeking nurses in the four cities of London, Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds.