Majority would like to address nurses pay claim in some manner
FEW dare to speak against our nurses who took their first strike day last Wednesday.
Virtually everyone thinks well of the nurses and why wouldn’t we as the tend and care for us and our loved ones when we are sick and at our most vulnerable.
Over the course of our lifetime we are very likely to need the skills and empathy of a nurse, whether for ourselves or a family member.
We know that they do a vital job and they must be amongst the most valued professions anyone can do.
Listening to the testimonials of nurses in the media and watching various documentaries on the HSE and the NHS in Britain, all us non-nurses have some insight to just how difficult and challenging a job it must be, with demanding patients, lack of resources, long shifts and anti-social hours over weekends and holiday periods.
It used to be said that nursing was a vocation, not a job. That particular phrase has fallen out of fashion and you rarely hear anyone describe their job as a vocation.
There is an acute problem in our healthcare system, indeed multiple acute problems, seemingly intractable problems, but the healthcare system is not like your computer or laptop when it starts acting up at work, you cannot switch it off and back on again. A simple reboot of the system will not work.
At any time 90% plus percent of the hospital beds are full of sick and injured patients, corridors are full of outpatients waiting for appointments and emergency departments are full of people in need of medical treatment by doctors and nurses.
We are spending €2million per week on agency nurses, that amounts to just over €100 million per annum. The point was made last week that we should stop spending that money on agency nurses and recruitment more staff nurses.
Fine, it’s a good idea, but you need those agency nursing hours the length and breadth of the country. Our hospitals are creaking at the moment, imagine what the nursing situation would be like without those agency nurses.
There are staff nursing jobs currently available but for a variety of reasons many of those agency nurses choose that working arrangement which suits their personal circumstances.
It is said that nurses are leaving college and heading straight for the airport to find work in the UK, Canada or Australia, where they are better paid and better resourced.
That is undoubtedly part of the story, but some may choose that option for part of a life adventure and some will return to Ireland in the years that follow.
Granting the nurses their demands will cost the public finances €300 million according to Government Ministers, a claim the INMO have not disputed.
Simply can we afford €300million, simply because of the knock-on cost of the follow on claims from other grades in the public sector.
It was wrong of the Government to use the threat of Brexit as an obstacle to meeting their pay demands last week. The two are entirely unrelated but that does not mean that the fallout of Brexit could wipe out all the gains the economy recovery have delivered in recent years.
Taosieach Leo Varadkar talked about a hard-Brexit costing up to 55,000 jobs which if it transpired could cost over €500 million in Department of Social Welfare benefits per annum.
Twenty four hours after the IMNO strike, officials working on the National children’s Hospital appeared before the Public Accounts Committee to explain the cost over run for the project which is estimated at almost €1 billion.
Had that project being more accurately costed the cost over-run might not have been as dramatic and some of the funds could have been diverted for the nurses pay claim which the majority would like to address in some measure.