Extra admin staff drafted to cope with A&E dispute
Nurses union says St Vincent’s work-to-rule didn’t harm patients
PATIENTS on trolleys in one of the country’s busiest hospitals faced i ncreased anxiety yesterday when nurses took industrial action.
The emergency department staff at St Vincent’s in Dublin began a work-to-rule in protest at overcrowding and shortages of staff and beds.
The union says it might escalate the industrial action if the crisis in emergency departments was not dealt with .
Nurses refused to do a number of non-nursing and clerical administrative tasks from 8am yesterday.
But administrative staff were put in place by management to handle the various duties the nurses withdrew from, according to the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation.
The nurses in the department were only answering the two emergency telephones used by the ambulance service.
IMNO industrial relations officer Philip McAnenly said the calls were ‘answered as normal, in fact, they’re now getting more attention and the response is better’.
He also claimed that the net effect of the work-to-rule ‘ has been to provide nurses with much more time for direct patient care and patient contact’.
Mr McAnenly added: ‘For the last number of years, when nurses were looking for that help they were told there was no budget for them – the embargo on recruitment meant they couldn’t get it. This morning, with industrial action, these grades are all in place. So that’s the good news for the patients.’
However, a spokeswoman f or St Vincent’s University Hospital said the impact of the INMO work-to-rule was causing increased challenges for the hospital’s emergency department.
The hospital spokeswoman also hit out at the union, saying that attempts to hire staff at a lower pay grade had been blocked by it.
‘Proposals by management to deploy additional nurses to the emergency department have been blocked by the INMO, which is i nsisting that these additional nurses be paid at a premium rate,’ the spokeswoman said in a statement issued to the media.
This was contrary to the claim by the INMO that this dispute is not about money.
The spokeswoman added: ‘ Management personnel are working to the best of their ability to ensure that our patients’ safety has not been compromised.’
The two main difficulties in the hospital, according to the INMO, is overcrowding and staff shortages.
Overcrowding continued yesterday, according to Mr McAnenly, with 35 patients admitted to A&E and awaiting for beds.
This was after six were referred out to other hospitals. Mr McAnenly said these patients were on trolleys ‘and on chairs, and on mattresses on the floor, or with no space at all, being managed in open corridors and open-plan areas’.
He said the work-to-rule was going to continue until such time as this dispute was resolved, adding that nurses had balloted to escalate the action if the issues they were highlighting were not addressed.
When asked whether escalated action could potentially mean A&E services would not be available to patients, the INMO spokesman argued the emergency services were already severely compromised.
He said he did not believe the public was ‘getting the service they require, deserve or respect’.
One A&E nurse, who asked not to be named, told the Irish Daily Mail that the department acted as a bottleneck for the entire hospital.
‘It’s not just an emergency department problem. It’s a hospital-wide, community- wide problem and, unfortunately, it’s the emergency department that’s dealing with it at the moment,’ she said. ‘ When patients are unable to be seen in a timely manner there’s a bottleneck.
‘Not only are we looking after the ED patients coming in, we’re looking after the equivalent of a ward or sometimes a ward and a half – and you’re doing that with the same amount of staff.’
Understaffing at St Vincent’s is a major concern for the INMO. Mr McAnenly said: ‘If you have five nurses where you should have 12 for the A&E work alone, then clearly, patient care is being compromised, risk is being introduced. They want to move people through the system faster than six hours, if necessary. But for that to happen, the overcrowding needs to be managed.
‘Patients now get more attention’