Irish nursing representatives are unhappy with the recruitment of nurses from developing countries which do not have a surplus of healthcare workers. Iva Pocock reports
Government policy on the recruitment of overseas nurses is that "Irish employers should only actively recruit in countries where the national government supports the process"; the Irish Nurses' Organisation (INO)says this does not reflect the "totality".
"We are now recruiting in countries which don't have a surplus," said INO secretary general Liam Doran. "There is no excuse for Ireland having to recruit overseas."
A total of 5,678 nurses from non-EU countries were registered by the nursing regulatory authority, An Bord Altranais, between 1998 and November 2003. While the predominant country of origin is the Philippines, nurses are also being recruited from India and the Republic of South Africa, amongst others.
"There are thousands from the Philippines but they train up nurses specifically for emigration there," says Oliver McDonagh, national nursing official with SIPTU. "One of the countries which has suffered a lot is India. There is an ethical problem if we are recruiting from countries which need them more than we do."
Earlier this year the OECD warned that the growing international mobility of healthcare workers can be expected to "considerably reduce" the number of doctors and nurses available to treat patients in developing countries.
It specifically mentioned that the brain drain of skilled health professionals from poorer countries to the rich world, where they can earn much more money, is an "increasingly important" issue in South Africa, where 5.4 per cent of the country's nurses are working abroad.
"We don't pay our nurses enough yet we bring in other nurses for whom our wages are relatively good," adds Mr Doran of the INO. "We're training enough nurses to meet our needs so supply isn't the problem, retention is."
In 2003, 770 more nurses started in their first year of degree courses than in 1998, according to the INO.
"The difficulty is that in two years 70 per cent of those people will leave to work overseas," says Mr Doran.
A Department of Health spokeswoman said it did not collate statistics on the number of Irish nurses leaving the profession each year.
She pointed out that the number of whole-time equivalent nurses employed in the public health service was 33,395 by the end of 2002, an increase of 25 per cent since 1998, including those recruited from abroad.
At the end of November 2003, a Health Service Employers Agency (HSEA) survey showed there were 722 nursing vacancies in the system, but that they were adequately compensated for "by the use of overtime and agency nurses".
The same survey found that in the year ending September 2003, there was an excess of 1,147 recruits over retirements and resignations "clearly demonstrating that the level of replacement is well ahead of attrition levels", the department spokeswoman added.
Many Irish nurses are leaving to work abroad in the far east, Britain, the US and Australia. But now that there is a worldwide shortage of nurses, Irish nurses are in greater demand, with a "lot of poaching by the US and Nordic countries" which are actively recruiting here, according to the INO.
"The difficulty is that we are joining in the rat race," says Mr Doran. "It's madness that we are going to the Philippines, South Africa and Spain. It's not cost effective and it is not in the interests of continuity of care."
Mr McDonagh says SIPTU's first priority is that any foreign nurses who are members are "treated fairly" and "that it doesn't become any sort of yellow pack labour, which it's not".
Overseas nurses enjoy the same employment protection as Irish and EU nurses, and are given the same career and development supports and opportunities, the Department of Health spokeswoman has pointed out.