NURSES AND administrative staff at the Mid-Western Regional Hospital in Limerick have separately voted overwhelmingly in favour of industrial action.
The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) said yesterday its members in the emergency department had backed industrial action in protest at reductions in bed numbers.
The trade union Impact also confirmed its members were in dispute with hospital management regarding the conditions of the medical records department at the hospital. The union said members had balloted unanimously for industrial action because management had consistently failed to address the scale of the problem.
Impact said the records library storage facility was too small to accommodate the increasing volume of records stored there.
“Impact members working at the hospital are concerned that the storage facilities for medical records are inadequate for the safe and efficient delivery of the service, and that the working environment poses a number of very substantial health and safety risks,” it said.
Meanwhile, further talks were taking place yesterday between the INMO and hospital management aimed at resolving the row over bed numbers. However the union warned that in the absence of a settlement, notice of industrial action would be served on the HSE.
It said it was likely industrial action would commence after a three-week period.
The nurses’ union said it was seeking assurances from the HSE that all patients requiring admission via the emergency department would be allocated a hospital bed on a priority basis and that all other services would be adjusted to facilitate this arrangement.
The union said HSE had decided last month to close a further 25 acute beds at the hospital.
The decision of its members to ballot for industrial action, it added, was due to sustained and constant hospital overcrowding which was exacerbated initially by the closure of 50 acute beds in Ennis and Nenagh hospitals in October 2009, and another 25 beds at St John’s Hospital in Limerick city.
INMO industrial relations officer Mary Fogarty said: “The factual situation for our members throughout the hospital is that they find themselves, and the attending patients, in an unsafe situation with overcrowded wards, non-recruitment of essential nurses to deliver appropriate nursing care . . . and increasing trolley figures in the emergency department.”